Advanced Packaging Technologies are Key for Semiconductor Innovation

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

“2017 was an unprecedented year for semiconductor industry,” comments Santosh Kumar, director of packaging, assembly and substrates at Yole Korea, part of Yole Développement. “The market grows by 21.6% year-to-year to reach record of almost $412 billion.”

Under this dynamic context, the advanced packaging industry is playing a key role, offering huge opportunities of innovation for the companies involved. According to Yole’s analyst, Santosh Kumar, the advanced packaging market should reach about $39 billion in 2023.

The market research and strategy consulting company Yole, releases this month, its famous report, Status of the Advanced Packaging Industry. Santosh Kumar, with the help of the advanced packaging team at Yole, proposes today an impressive 2018 edition with key market trends, the description of technology evolution, a detailed analysis of the competitive landscape.

For the 1st time, this technology & market report includes a specific section dedicated to the advanced packaging technologies in the new semiconductor era. It offers a short term and long-term outlook, with detailed roadmaps. It also details the impact of front-end scaling on advanced packaging. In addition, Yole’s team points out the competitive landscape, with disruption and opportunities, detailed supply chain, production splits by manufacturers…

“This report is part of our key advanced packaging technology & market analyses,” asserts Emilie Jolivet, Director, Semiconductor & Software at Yole. “Thanks to this report, we built a strong reputation and became step by step one of the major consulting companies in this area.”

Between 2017 and 2023, the total packaging market’s revenue will grow at 5.2% CAGR. In parallel, over the same period, the advanced packaging market will grow at 7% CAGR. On the other hand, the traditional packaging market will grow at a lower CAGR of 3.3%.

Of the different advanced packaging platforms, 3D TSV and fan-out will grow at rates of 29% and 15%, respectively. Flip-chip, which constitutes the majority of the advanced packaging market, will grow at CAGR of almost 7%. Meanwhile, fan-in WLP will grow at a 7% CAGR from 2017−2023, mainly led by mobile.

“Advanced packages will continue their important role of addressing high-end logic and memory in computing and telecom, with further penetration in analog and RF in high-end consumer/mobile segments,” analyses Santosh Kumar from Yole. All of this while eyeing opportunities in the growing automotive and industrial segments.

What happened in 2017?

According to Yole, two advanced packaging roadmaps are foreseen:

• Scaling: going to sub10 nm nodes
• And functional: staying above 20nm nodes.

In parallel, the semiconductor industry is developing products on both of them. Under this favorable context, advanced semiconductor packaging is seen as a way to increase the value of a semiconductor product, adding functionality, maintaining/increasing performance while lowering cost.

Both roadmaps hold more multi-die heterogeneous integration including SiP and higher levels of package customization in the future. A variety of multi-die packaging is developing in both high and low end, for consumer, performance and specialized applications. Heterogeneous integration has created opportunities for both the substrate and WLP based SiP.

2017 also show the merger of 3 competitive areas that will continue to develop: PCB vs. substrate, substrate vs. fan-out and fan-out vs. 2.5D/3D.

It will be difficult to repeat 2017 performances and Yole’s Semiconductor & Software team went further in its investigation this year again, to propose you today a comprehensive analysis of this evolution. Lot of questions are still pending, and the Status of the Advanced Packaging industry will give you a deep understanding of the megatrends impacting this industry, the related business opportunities and technical innovations.