ECE Ph.D. student Vijay Sukumaran and his Ph.D. advisor Rao Tummala won the Intel Best Student Paper Award for "Through-Package-Via Formation and Metallization of Glass Interposers" at the 60th IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference, which was held in Las Vegas last June.

Mr. Sukuraman and Dr. Tummala shared this honor with their Georgia Tech coauthors Venky Sundaram, Sunghwan Min, and Nitesh Kumbhat, Christian Nopper of STMicroelectronics, and Georgia Tech colleagues Tapobrata Bandyopadhyay, Hunter Chan, Qiao Chen, and Fuhan Liu. Dr. Tummala is the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Electronics Packaging and is the director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center.

In this paper, glass is proposed as a superior alternative interposer technology to address the limitations of both silicon and organic interposers. The inherent electrical properties of glass, together with large area panel size availability, make it a superior material compared to organic and silicon-based interposers. However, glass is not without its challenges. It suffers in two ways: 1) formation of vias at low cost, and 2) its lower thermal conductivity compared to silicon. This research explores glass as an interposer material, and addresses these key challenges in through package via (TPV) formation and subsequent low cost and large area metallization to achieve very high I/Os at fine pitch. The purpose of this research is to develop and demonstrate a novel glass package technology, which will be applicable in future microelectronic systems.