Naturally from the fact that SiP's main application area is in consumer type products, the biggest concern of SiP designers is in the manufacturing cost. Such examples can be found in many places: efforts have been paid for minimizing the number of routing layers in the interposer, rather using through holes instead of buried vias, etc.

  The second issue is the time-to-market, or equivalently design time reduction. Especially, the interposer routability study tends to take long time, and efficient methodology is demanded.

  Third, efficient methodology in the early feasibility study (FS) phase is hoped, because that phase determines the global structure of the SiP and thus divide the whole design work into the tasks of involved designers. The key to improve the efficiency in FS phase is in how the members in different specialty can share a global view and negotiate their interfaces smoothly.

  Finally, the signal integrity and power reduction are considered to minimize noise, power, and thermal problems simultaneously.

  GemPackage directly focuses in the 2nd (design time) and 3rd (FS efficiency) points in the above concerns, and to indirectly contribute to other points.

  For instance, we introduce unique 'Sketch-and-Convert' methodology for interposer routability study, which was reported to speed up the task by factor 4 in average. To increase the FS efficiency, it is not enough that each member can work efficiently in his specialized area. It is also important that he can go one step beyond his area to help each other in the team. GemPackage pay a lot of effort for this point. It is carefully designed to keep the tool simple, let automated functions work implicitly without complicated settings. Functions related to detailed design or DFM purposes are omitted in general, although DRC functions are supported in detailed level to guarantee the manufacturbility. Physical design aspects are covered directly, such as chip IO placement and assignment, power planning, PoP planning, floorplanning, bonding design, interposer routability study, design review report, and 3D examination.

  The simpleness of a tool is very important to increase efficiency in a team work. If too many buttons are scattered, non-specialist may say: "this is too much to handle. let the specialist cover this." We pay efforts to reduce the number of buttons, to use design words instead of 'CAD-like' words, to use figures in dialogs, etc.