The golden age of advanced packaging is coming!

As one of the important ways to continue Moore's Law, advanced packaging technology has received attention in the industry. Manufacturers with different business models, including foundries, substrate/PCB suppliers, EMS/ODM, etc., have joined the battle. It is worth noting that since the beginning of this spring, reports on advanced packaging have been frequently seen in the newspapers. Combining the various dynamics of advanced packaging in the past and in the future, we may predict that the golden age of advanced packaging is coming.

Past: Real money investment

Advanced packaging mainly refers to packaging technologies such as flip chip, bumping, wafer level packaging, 2.5D packaging (interposer, RDL, etc.), and 3D packaging (TSV). At the beginning of its birth, advanced packaging only had WLP, 2.5D packaging, and 3D packaging. In recent years, the development of advanced packaging has exploded in all directions, and each company that develops related technologies has independently named its own technology as a registered trademark, such as TSMC's InFO, CoWoS, ASE's FoCoS, Amkor's SLIM, SWIFT, etc.

Compared with traditional packaging, advanced packaging technology is more efficient on the one hand; on the other hand, as chips evolve towards smaller and thinner, advanced packaging technology has lower average cost and can achieve better cost performance. The advantages of advanced packaging are also an important reason why the industry has entrusted it with important tasks.

According to Yole Developpement's latest 2021 annual high-end packaging report, industry leaders' capital expenditures on advanced packaging are approximately $11.9 billion. Among them, Intel ranks first with a capital expenditure of $3.5 billion, mainly to support Foveros and EMIB technologies; TSMC ranks second with a capital expenditure of $3.05 billion. It is defining new system-level roadmaps and technologies for 3D system-on-chip components. Its CoWoS platform provides a silicon interposer, and the LSI platform is a direct competitor to EMIB; ASE ranks third with a capital expenditure of $2 billion. It is the largest and only OSAT that can compete with foundries and integrated device manufacturers. With its FoCoS products, ASE is also the only OSAT that currently has ultra-high-density fan-out solutions. Samsung ranks fourth with a capital expenditure of $1.5 billion, and the company also has I-Cube technology similar to CoWoS. In addition, China's Changdian Technology and Tongfu Microelectronics are also on the list.

Source: Yole

Now: The heat continues to rise

Over the past year, industry leaders have invested substantial amounts of money in advanced packaging, and this year the enthusiasm for advanced packaging has not diminished and is poised to continue heating up.

March this year has become the "Advanced Packaging Month". On March 3, the first major news related to advanced packaging came. Ten giants including Intel, TSMC, Samsung and ASE announced the establishment of a universal chip interconnect standard - UCIe, which will standardize chiplet technology. This standard also provides "advanced packaging" level specifications, covering all high-density silicon bridge-based technologies such as EMIB and InFO.

On the 10th, Apple released the M1 Ultra chip. Some industry insiders believe that the chip uses TSMC's CoWoS-S (chip-on-wafer-on substrate with silicon interposer) packaging process.

On the 14th, Samsung Electronics established a new test and packaging (TP) center within the DS (Semiconductor Business and Device Solutions) Division. Korean media believe that the establishment of the center and the adjustment of personnel may mean that Samsung Electronics will strengthen its investment in advanced packaging to ensure that it is ahead of TSMC in the back-end field.

On the 17th, Intel announced that it would invest more than 33 billion euros in the European Union. In addition to chip manufacturing, it will also invest up to 4.5 billion euros in back-end manufacturing facilities in Italy. It is reported that the factory will "use new and innovative technologies" to provide products for the European Union.

On the 21st, TSMC successfully won the exclusive foundry order for Apple's iPhone A series processors for many years by providing one-stop services of integrated wafer-level fan-out packaging (InFO) and front-end advanced processes. It is understood that TSMC's InFO_PoP packaging technology has entered the seventh generation, and in addition to Apple, it will attract orders from major Android smartphone SoC suppliers including Qualcomm and MediaTek.

On the 30th, at Huawei's 2021 annual performance conference, Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping said that the use of chip stacking technology to exchange area for performance, using less advanced processes to obtain stronger performance, ensures that Huawei's products are competitive, which can be said to be a formal confirmation that Huawei is promoting chip stacking technology. Jiwei.com analyzed that in the case of inability to obtain advanced process capacity, advanced packaging is almost a "clear card" for Huawei to break through in high-performance semiconductor devices. Immediately afterwards, in early April, Huawei disclosed a patent for "a chip stacking package and terminal equipment."

On April 11, it was reported that the U.S. Department of Commerce is promoting the development plan of advanced packaging technology. According to reports, the Advanced Manufacturing Office of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce has selected the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) as a contractor to prepare a roadmap for microelectronics and advanced packaging technology (MAPT) in the next 18 months. SRC stated that advanced packaging and 3D single-chip and heterogeneous integration will become the key driving force of the next microelectronics revolution. In fact, advanced packaging is becoming an alternative route for transistor scaling in the 2D Moore's Law era.

In summary, advanced packaging has become an increasingly common theme in semiconductors.

Future: A large number of products will be launched and will usher in a big explosion

In fact, it can be seen from the future development layout of major manufacturers that in the near future, with the successive launch of advanced packaging products, advanced packaging may usher in a real explosion.

Recently, the latest report from US-based foreign companies pointed out that it is estimated that both Nvidia Hopper and AMD RDNA 3 GPUs will begin to adopt 2.5D packaging technology this year. In order to meet Nvidia's strong order demand, TSMC's purchases of heat dissipation, bottom filling and flux materials, and CoWoS application substrates may increase threefold this year.

In addition, it was revealed that the A16 AP of Apple's new iPhone in 2022 will adopt TSMC's InFO_PoP packaging technology, and MediaTek's mobile phone AP will adopt TSMC's InFO_B solution in 2023.

Intel expects that the Ponte Vecchio GPU, which will be launched in the first half of 2022, will adopt Co-EMIB packaging technology. In addition, Intel's Meteor Lake CPU is expected to enter mass production in the second half of 2022 and be launched in the first half of 2023. According to DIGITIMES Research, the Meteor Lake CPU will adopt Foveros Omni technology and will be the first mainstream CPU to adopt 3D packaging technology. 

AMD's Zen 4 architecture CPU to be launched in the second half of 2022 will adopt TSMC's SoIC solution (hybrid bonding technology). Hybrid bonding has a smaller chip pad pitch and higher I/O density than micro-bumps, improving HPC chip performance. 

MediaTek's HPC products will develop towards the chiplet architecture and are expected to be launched in 2023, when they will adopt TSMC's InFO_oS solution; by 2024, hybrid bonding technology will be introduced and TSMC's 3D Fabric platform will be adopted. 

In an interview with Wang Hongbo, co-founder of Huafeng Technology, at the "2022 Third China Semiconductor Investment Alliance Annual Meeting and China IC Power List Awards Ceremony" jointly held by the China Semiconductor Investment Alliance and Aijiwei in January this year, he analyzed that 2022 will be the year of explosion for advanced packaging. The already popular advanced packaging processes such as FC flip-chip will continue to flourish, and mainland China will be the main battlefield; wafer-level packaging, which is currently less used internationally, will first usher in a golden development period in overseas markets such as Taiwan, South Korea, and other overseas markets and carry out large-scale expansion of production, and the mainland market will also accelerate the pace of catching up and catch up in technology, gradually entering the small-batch mass production stage from the research and development stage; advanced packaging processes will continue to branch out, and various new advanced packaging processes will be developed. New processes in various directions such as 3D, ChipLet, and SiP will emerge in endlessly and flourish.

根据Yole数据，2020年全球封装市场规模微涨0.3%，达到677亿美元。而按推算，2021年全球封装市场规模约上涨14.8%，约达777亿美元。根据Yole预计，2021年先进封装的全球市场规模约350亿美元，到2025年先进封装的全球市场规模约420亿美元，2019-2025年全球先进封装市场的CAGR约8%，相比同期整体封装市场(CAGR=5%)和传统封装市场，先进封装市场的增长更为显著，将为全球封装市场贡献主要增量。

In the future, emerging applications such as the Internet of Things, automotive electronics, and high-performance computing are expected to continue to open up growth space for advanced packaging. The golden age of advanced packaging is coming!