Creating Semiconductor Value through Advanced Package Technology Open Access

Over the past few years, there has been a significant shift from PCs and notebooks to smartphones and tablets as drivers of advanced packaging innovation. In fact, the overall packaging industry is doing quite well today as a result, with solid growth expected to create a market value in excess of $30B USD by 2020. This is largely due to the technology innovation in the semiconductor industry continuing to march forward at an incredible pace, with silicon advancements in new node technologies continuing on one end of the spectrum and innovative packaging solutions coming forward on the other in a complementary fashion. The pace of innovation has quickened as has the investments required to bring such technologies to production. At the packaging level, the investments required to support the advancements in silicon miniaturization and heterogeneous integration have now reached well beyond $500M USD per year. Why has the investment to support technology innovation in the packaging community grown so much? One needs to look no further than the complexity of the most advanced package technologies being used today and coming into production over the next year. Advanced packaging technologies have increased in complexity over the years, transitioning from single to multi-die packaging, enabled by 3-dimensional integration, system-in-package (SiP), wafer-level packaging (WLP), 2.5D/3D technologies and creative approached to embedding die. These new innovative packaging technologies enable more functionality and offer higher levels of integration within the same package footprint, or even more so, in an intensely reduced footprint. In an industry segment that has grown accustomed to a multitude of package options, technology consolidation seems evident, producing “The Big Five” advanced packaging platforms. These include low-cost flip chip, wafer-level chip-scale package (WLCSP), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), laminate-based advanced system-in-package (SiP) and wafer-based advanced SiP designs. This presentation will address ‘The Big Five’ packaging platforms and how they are adding value to the Semiconductor Industry.