Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Wrap Up

BBUL in Action

When we originally brought you our article on Intel's BBUL packaging technology we had some shots of what a BBUL CPU would look like. During his keynote, Gelsinger provided another FC-PGA vs. BBUL demonstration which will hopefully give you a refresher of the benefits of BBUL.

The surface of the package is completely flat which will make cooling an easier task and of course there are the other advantages which we illustrated in our original article. While we won't get into them here, we'll provide an abridged list as a refresher:

- Enables much greater micro-via counts
- No solder bumps
- Enables cost-effective multi-core CPUs and multi-chip packages

If you're tired of waiting for Serial ATA to happen then you probably shouldn't have read about BBUL as it'll take another 5 years for this technology to be implemented in CPUs. As usual, it'll start where needed the most and in low-volume areas and then move on to the mainstream and eventually BBUL will be used on all Intel CPUs.