By Gail Flower, Editor-in-Chief
This year’s IMAPS International Symposium, held Nov 3-6, 2008, in Providence, RI had great international participation, good attendance, and excellent presentations from keynoters to the technologically cutting-edge educational papers. It was election day when the IMAPS conference began, and by the second day of the conference, a new president entered the picture. Therefore, the first day proceeded without a rush of attendees as expected, but the second perked up with lively conversation and fuller aisles.
John C. Zolper, Ph.D., of Raytheon, formerly of DARPA, gave a broad keynote with lots of technical information on the challenges facing our industry, starting with a bit of history and ending with the latest frontiers. One goal he identified is to develop design process technology for true 3D ICs with multiple active layers. He also talked about getting more power out of the same footprint, and ending up with a thermal management challenge. Zolper set an agenda of items including: nanostructure materials and their flexible, lightweight ability to change material properties that will be used in the future. He reviewed the integration of MEMS devices in all types of applications from air bag accelerators to Wii consumer games and ink jet printers. Zolper indicated that businesses in the U.S. need collaborations with those doing leading-edge technology research to stimulate the marketplace.
The hottest topic in our industry right now seems to be how to get on board the alternative energy wagon, and here IMAPS had it covered as well with an end-of-day event called Alternative Energy Options: Supply Chains and Industry Trends. Many talked about how distributed the solar energy market seemed and how the lack of policies and incentives to develop this area is holding the U.S. back from what it could be producing.
Alan J. King of Evergreen Solar said that he was encouraged that President-elect Obama has already identified energy independence as a goal for the U.S.
Right now this is where the world stands as controlling the solar market: Germany leads at 45% of the global market; Spain has 25%; Japan holds approximately 15%; and the U.S. trails at 8%. Continual change in government regulations has hindered U.S. market growth in this area; however, in Germany for the last 15 years the market has been subsidized for those investing in solar cells. “We can drill as much as we want, but there is not enough sustainable fuel to support the need,” said King. “Yet enough sunlight reaches the earth every hour to provide the earth’s needs for a year,” he added. Many of the other presenters talked about what the electronics industry is doing to progress the technology and create new jobs in this field in which the market is expanding at 40%/year.
The Global Business Council session focused on how organization fits in with various industry roadmaps. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) concentrates on front-end wafer fabs with a focus on top-level industry segments, but dedicates a chapter on semiconductor assembly and packaging. iNEMI focuses mainly on board-level assembly roadmapping with a chapter on semiconductor assembly and packaging. ITRS and iNEMI are working together to align their semiconductor and packaging roadmaps with many of the same people on both teams. IMAPS focuses on semiconductor assembly and packaging.
According to Laurie Roth, co-chair of IMAPS Global Business Council, IMAPS will address the gaps in these roadmaps, supporting the ITRS and iNEMI updates with input, and communicate back to IMAPS on both issues and trends to recommend areas of focus including developing feasible embedded components, developing enhanced materials to enable wafer-level packaging (WLP), resolving thermal management issues, developing new materials to deliver necessary performance, closing the gap between chip and substrate interconnect density, and resolving the issues that low-k materials and Cu bring to packaging. In many instances, today packaging costs often exceed die fabrication costs. Profit margins must be maintained so that the industry can thrive.
We left IMAPS this year packed with new ideas and filled with a determination to go through the conference technical papers in detail. Here’s where the new ideas abound. All in all, IMAPS was a gem.