Hello All,
Has anyone tried using KiCad to do Interposer designs for Chiplets? I’ve been playing with wire bonding lead-frames to die using a script to take DEF and create a footprint and symbol for the die and the packing wizard for the lead-frame. I would expect an interposer wouldn’t be a stretch since it is technically the PCB and the chiplets are the IC. I would say the only limitation I’ve run into is the scaling since chiplet bump pitches are in um vs mm, and the packing wizard should have an option to generate a generic symbol for the footprint it just made.
I do not know what are interposers and chiplets and maybe others on the forum do not either. Maybe include a few links in your next post?
Never done one, but if the job is done with ‘standard’ PCB and DevTools, probably KiCad can do it (or be modified to)
the minimum grid spacing currently doable is 0.001mm:
KiCad’s native resolution is in nano meters, so there is plenty of resolution.
I tried to set a small grid in the preferences, but KiCad complains and the smallest it will accept is 1um just as Claudio.Lorini mentioned.
You will also bump into other limitations / bugs at this scale level. For example: PCB Editor / Inspect / Measure Tool is struggling with this resolution.
I’m not a KiCad developer, but I guess that support for fine pitch stuff will improve over time, but at the moment the KiCad development team is still quite small, and there are many feature requests, and features that appeal to a small set of the users have a lower priority.
You can create a test project to find out how good it works for you and get an overview of the most pressing issues. If you’re really serious about this, then contacting https://www.kipro-pcb.com/ is an option. They do commercial support for KiCad (so it’s not free) and they also do priority development and bug fixes for customers.