Research and
Markets, the leading source for international market research and market
data, has announced the addition of the "IC
Advanced Packaging Industry Report, 2009" report to their offering.
The semiconductor industry is in the era of 32nm process, and it is expected
that it will meet 16nm around 2019. Designing a 45nm SoC costs USD20-50 million
except labor cost, and the design of a 32nm SoC costs USD75-120 million, while
it is less than USD5 million for 130nm. Therefore, even if the IC design companies
with annual revenue of over USD2 billion probably can not afford such high cost,
and there are no more than ten such companies all over the world, which means
that the majority of IC design companies are disqualified to enter 45nm or 32nm
era. Perhaps the semiconductor industry will develop at the pace of Moore's
Law. Having made up for the bottleneck of process shrinkage, the packaging industry
will yield unusually brilliant results in post-Moore's Law era.
In practice, the packaging industry has become increasingly important since
2000, and the debut of BGA, FC and CSP has sped up the progression of semiconductor
industry. However, the front-end of semiconductor manufacturing has been in
stagnancy, still in the era of 12-inch wafer, and it is likely that 15-inch
wafer era will not come. Currently, a revolutionary packaging, TSV packaging
presents itself, which is so called 3D IC. The technology will dramatically
improve chip transistor density, cubic density rather than plane density, and
make semiconductor industry surpass the development pace of Moore's Law. Not
only packaging companies and wafer OEMs, but also nearly all global prominent
semiconductor companies such as IBM, Samsung, Intel and Qualcomm are all actively
developing TSV technology. TSV has been in large shipment in image sensor and
MEMS field, and it will rapidly expand to memory field in the future, and to
DSP, RF IC, cell phone baseband, processor, CPU and GPU in 2013. Furthermore,
TSV market size will rise to over US$2 billion from less than US$ 300 million
currently, which will be the rapidest growing field in semiconductor industry.
In the meantime, the advanced packaging has an increasingly powerful driving
force. IC advanced packaging mainly refers to IC substrate packaging, including
BGA, CSP, FC and LGA, and it mainly applies for cell phone, memory, PC (CPU,
GPU and Chipest), network communications, and consumer electronics. In addition,
the network communications include high-speed switch, router and base station.
Consumer electronics are as the followings such as game console, IPOD, ITOUCH,
and high-end PMP. The cell phone has more and more powerful functions, thinner
and thinner in size; and the smart phones have covered a rising ratio. In the
field of memory, DDR3 has become the mainstream, with the rate increased to
over 1GHz; CPU has multi-cores, and the number of pins has exceeded 1,200. China's
3G and the world's 4G network distribution has boosted up the sales of base
stations. The stay-at-home economy has made game machine shipment increase sharply
as well.
Japan and Taiwan have almost dominated IC packaging industry.