Our mission is to provide innovative packaging solutions for supercomputers, servers, client machines and wireless technologies. We provide best-of-breed design and simulation tools, develop new characterization techniques, and implement leading-edge thermal and mechanical solutions for IBM systems. In addition, we use new architectural concepts in designing and building prototype systems to explore peak supercomputer performance. We also support supercomputing on existing high-end IBM machines.
IBM Research built on its pioneering work of the 1970s in efficient numerical techniques for calculating the electromagnetic behavior of realistic package and chip structures to create an extensive suite of extremely powerful and accurate solvers, capable of modeling the largest problem size in the industry. ElectroMagnetic Surface modeling (EMSurf) and ElectroMagnetic Simulation (EMSIM) are full-wave, three-dimensional frequency domain solvers that can handle up to one million current elements. Two- dimensional and three-dimensional electromagnetic field solvers allow extraction of wiring electrical parameters with highly inhomogeneous dielectric environments. Special test devices have been built to capture the relevant aspects of current and future packaging structures and technologies, using time-domain high-speed measurement techniques. GAMMA-Z, a special time-domain technique, allows extraction of broadband transmission line matrix elements for maximum interconnect band-widths, resulting in realistic card and ceramic interconnect parameter extractions up to 50 GHz.