Abstract: Wafer level solder ball bridge formation is used to provide electrical and thermal coupling between bond pads formed on substrates and bond pads formed on devices mounted on substrates. Solder balls anchored to solder-wettable bond pads enable sequential linking of laterally coupled solder balls over non-solder-wettable surface in the formation of solder ball bridge assemblies. Solder ball bridges formed between a device disposed on a substrate and a substrate enables thermal energy transfer and electrical interconnection between the device and the substrate.

Abstract: A low-latency, high-bandwidth, hybrid TDM/WDM architecture for connecting processing nodes into a high-performance computing environment designed as a system area network is disclosed. Each node has a receiver for receiving optical communication within a fibre at all wavelength channels supported by the system simultaneously and individually. Each node also has a transmitter for transmitting at at least two wavelengths. One of the wavelengths is a default wavelength for the node. In order to transmit data, a node requests a channel and is provided with a transmit wavelength at which to transmit data. Other nodes receive the data and, when the recipient is the addressee of the data, the data is then forwarded to a computing device connected to the node or in communication therewith. The architecture provides robust communication with high bandwidth.