Rebranding as the Global Electronics Association is not the only major change happening at APEX EXPO this year. There’s also a shift in the scope of the technical program as heterogenous integration and other advanced packaging methodologies come into the mainstream at both the component and system levels. We spoke with Matt Kelly, CTO and conference general chair, Devan Iyer, chief strategist for advanced electronic packaging, and Stan Rak and Udo Welzel, now in their fourth year as chairs of the Technical Program Committee, about what distinguishes the conference this year.

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The electronics industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation driven by demands for smaller form factors, higher performance, and greater functional integration. Two technologies sit at the center of this transformation: flexible PCBs and advanced semiconductor packaging. In this article, I’ll explore the technical foundations and key forces driving this convergence. Flexible PCBs are electrical interconnects fabricated on bendable substrates such as polyimide or polyester. Unlike rigid PCBs, flex circuits can conform to three-dimensional shapes, enabling designers to route signals through space rather than across flat planes

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As the need grows for higher processing speed and the expanded functionality required for newer generations of central processing units (CPUs), the necessity for higher-density interconnect solutions is paramount. The current trend toward furnishing a single, monolithic system-level semiconductor package has become a serious yield issue in fabrication. For example, with all of the peripheral supporting functions on a single die platform, wafer fabrication yields are often below target and, although the CPU portion of a monolithic semiconductor may be perfect, if one or more of the supporting functions on the same die fails, the entire processor unit must be discarded. 

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