Packaging has a much more important role in manufacturing semiconductors than in the past, according to Ignas van Dommelen, director of Development, Marketing and Sales, at Elmos Advanced Packaging. The industry used to look at packaging as a final manufacturing step, but now packaging has become (similar to test) an enabling technology that we need to succeed. EPPE interviewed van Dommelen recently about developments in packaging. For the last five years, he has been involved in organizing the annual Semi Advanced Packaging Conference at Semicon Europa. He shares with us some of the highlights of the conference and how the presentations will address today’s manufacturing issues.
Elevating manufacturing to the next level is the issue. Van Dommelen states that “One of the important new developments in packaging is ’fan in’ or ‘fan out’ packaging. The technology is not completely new, but is now approaching industrialization.” One of the issues is the drive in the application space to merge heterogeneous IC’s and embedded devices in very small, low-cost, high-performance system in packages. At the upcoming event, Navjot Chhabra, a redistributed Chip Packaging Manager at Freescale will address this issue when he discusses “The evolution and convergence of advanced fan out packaging in 2D and 3D structures with dissimilar technologies for high performance, highly integrated systems.”
With environment issues and regulations unavoidable, another issue is substitute materials for high-lead solders. Van Dommelen says, “There are major breakthrough alternatives for high-conductive materials.” That’s exactly what Gunther Dreezen, Henkel Electronic Adhesives, will discuss in his upcoming presentation on “Polymeric Alternatives to Solder Die Attach for Power Assemblies.” Van Dommelen believes that some of the technologies have reached a level of maturation where it could change manufacturing. He concedes that it takes a long time to reach acceptance in the market, but says that breakthrough technology will prevail.
Packaging is making a bigger contribution to the functionality of the device at the end. Van Dommelen says, “We see that the border between packaging and device manufacturing is becoming increasingly blurred. In other words, it’s not a sequential step anymore.” While traditional packaging is not going away, “even Imec says that wafer-level packaging is zero-level packaging. First-level packaging is not going away but we’re just taking some of the burden onto the front.” He says that packaging isn’t a final manufacturing step, that it has become an enabling technology that we need to be successful.
Van Dommelen says that Elmos focuses on close cooperation with the customer to develop a complete packaging solution to customers. He will present on “Successful Package Development and Manufacturing of an Automotive Oil Level Sensor System.” He stresses that “The systems manufacturer is our customer, which is not traditional at all. The system manufacturer supplies all the materials and we build them together into a final solution for him. Packaging plays a key role, because all the things come together in the package.” He sees this “as a trend for standard components, but that the standard components could be building blocks to build deviated systems.”
The major change is that now the product designer talks to the front-end people. “From the very beginning of designing a product, you need the involvement of the packaging and the MEMS and the test people otherwise you can’t design that specialized product.” Packaging became an integral part the product which is exciting because in the past, packaging people were sometimes kept in the semi dark.
Some of these new customized packaging solutions will eventually become standard products. In the early phase, we need to invent local solutions. This relates to the upcoming keynote on “System Design, Drives Package Design” by Peter Robinson at CSR plc. “System design is changing how business is done. The traditional way was that silicon design was driving the package design. So have silicon ready then supply to your assembler to assemble in the package. Now we see that it‘s turned around. The System requirement drives how the package should look and the package drives how the silicon should look, otherwise we cannot assemble it.” CSR has changed the over-the-wall approach to product development, allowing the different application requirements to drive the PCB-Package-IC co-design process.
The focus on energy savings and green technology are the driving forces for LEDs. One of the keynotes features Raimund Schwarz from Osram Opto Semiconductors presenting on “High Brightness Phosphor Converted White LEDs – Challenges and Solutions.” Van Dommelen states, “One of the booming markets is LEDs and packaging plays a critically important role.” To give a more complete picture of LED packaging technology, examples of proper selected housing and casting materials to improve the degradation behavior of HB LED packages will be shown and the potentials of brightness gain due to index matching with high-refractive silicones (HRI) will be discussed.
Packaging is a big issue. Semicon Europa Advanced Packaging Technologies Conference (19–20 October) is about production and manufacturing, focusing on what is currently going on and addressing new technologies that mature industrialization. Van Dommelen urges people in the industry to become aware of what’s going on in Europe by attending the upcoming show. He says that it’s an opportunity to “Find out what’s happening now on packaging and manufacturing.”
These topics and more will be covered at Semicon Europa 2010. With a theme this year of “Enabling Packaging Technologies for System Integration”, the four sessions are: Packaging for Systems with CSR, Fraunhofer IZM, Elmos Advanced Packaging, Micro Materials Center; Alternative Device Packaging with Osram Opto, BridgeWave Communications, and NXP; Embedded Wafer-Level Packaging (Infineon, Nanium, Freescale); and Packaging and Materials with Bosch, Henkel, Oerlikon, and ASE.
The Semi Advanced Packaging Conference scheduled from 19 to 20 October in Dresden.
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