Category Archives: Displays

What would happen if half of all global production for dynamic random access memory (DRAM), two-thirds of NAND flash manufacturing and 70 percent of the world’s tablet display supply suddenly disappeared from the market?

The answer would be chaos, with the worldwide electronics supply chain grinding to a halt and stopping major market product segments in their tracks, including smartphones, media tablets and PCs.

For high-tech companies, this could be the outcome if current tensions escalate to the point of war on the Korean peninsula, resulting in the disruption of South Korea’s technology manufacturing base. While IHS regards such a major conflagration and disruption as unlikely, forward-thinking technology firms are planning for such a contingency, just as they are preparing for other natural and man-made disasters that could impact their businesses in the future.

“However, South Korea now plays a more important role than ever in the global electronics business. And with the supply chain having become more entwined and connected, a significant disruption in any region will impact the entire world. Because of this, it is important for companies to understand the magnitude of South Korea’s role in the global electronics market—and to prepare for any contingencies,” said Mike Howard, senior principal analyst for DRAM and memory at IHS.

Leading technology firms Samsung and SK Hynix are headquartered close to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which lies only about 30 miles from the border with North Korea. Both companies have major manufacturing operations in the area as well.

“Any type of manufacturing disruption of six months would prevent the shipment of hundreds of millions of mobile phones and tens of millions of PCs and media tablets,” Howard warned.

Memory loss

Fully 66 percent of industry revenue for the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market, as well as 48 percent of total NAND flash revenue, belonged in 2012 to the two South Korean memory titans Samsung and SK Hynix. While their combined share of both in the NAND market has remained fairly level for the last three years, the collective portion in DRAM of the two entities has been steadily rising.

Such a high proportion of global production could not be easily or quickly replaced by manufacturers in other regions.

The Icheon facility of SK Hynix is located approximately 30 miles southwest of Seoul, while Samsung’s massive manufacturing complex at Hwaseong is within 24 miles of the capital.

DRAM plays an essential role in products including PCs, media tablets and smartphones.

While some gadgets could have their amount of memory reduced—a smartphone with 32 gigabytes (GB) of NAND could be downsized to 8GB, or an 8GB laptop reduced to 4GB—other devices must have the memory for which they were originally designed, especially where DRAM is involved.

“A server with only half its intended DRAM is essentially half a server—and a smartphone cannot have its DRAM quantity changed, as it needs the original amount for which it was designed,” Howard noted.

Display disaster

An equally bad situation could occur in the large-sized display market, which is heavily dependent on South Korean suppliers, especially in the media tablet market.

LG Display and Samsung Display of South Korea together held a 49.6 percent share of unit shipments of large-sized liquid crystal display (LCD) panels in the fourth quarter of 2012. Large-sized panels are defined as those that are 10-inches or larger in the diagonal dimension and are used in products including televisions, notebook PCs and desktop monitors. Also included in the category are and 7-inch and larger displays used in media tablets.

South Korea accounts for 70 percent of global supply of tablet display unit shipments, as presented in the figure attached.

“Inventory and production capacity for media tablet displays currently are at a high level,” said Sweta Dash, senior director, display research & strategy, for IHS. “Because of this, a short-term disruption of South Korean production would have a minimal impact. However, a long-term stoppage or reduction of production would have a major effect and dramatically reduce global tablet supply.”

Media Tablet Display Production by Country in Q4 2012

(Share of Global Unit Shipments

global tablet display makers

Phone hangup

Samsung at present is the global leader in smartphones as well as in total handsets, while fellow South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics ranks No. 6 in both categories. Together, the two companies account for more than a 30 percent market share for cellphones and smartphones.

China rose to the top of the PC market for the first time ever on an annual basis last year, relegating the United States to second place with a lead of more than 3 million units, according to an IHS iSuppli PC Dynamics Market Brief from information and analytics provider IHS.

PC shipments in 2012 to China amounted to 69 million units, exceeding the 66 million total reached by the United States. Only a year earlier in 2011, the United States was the leading global destination for PCs.

Beyond its large size, China’s PC market exhibits distinct characteristics that set it apart from the computer trade elsewhere, possessing a vast untapped rural market and unique consumer-purchasing patterns. While desktop PC shipments lagged notebooks around the world, the two PC segments were on par in China in 2012, with an even 50-50 split, as shown in the table below.

China PC shipments

“The equal share of shipments for desktops and notebooks in China is unusual, since consumers in most regions today tend to prefer more agile mobile PCs, rather than the bulky, stationary desktops,” said Peter Lin, senior analyst for compute platforms at IHS. “The relatively large percentage of desktop PC shipments in China is due to huge demand in the country’s rural areas, which account for a major segment of the country’s 1.34 billion citizens. These consumers tend to prefer the desktop form factor.”

The market will change gradually as desktop PCs face rising competition from the high value proposition presented by notebooks. Notebooks will then surpass desktops in the country by 2014, tracking more closely with the worldwide desktop-to-notebook PC ratio of 36 to 64 percent.

The desktop vs. notebook pattern of consumption in China is only one example of the distinctive hallmarks of the country’s dynamic PC market. In another indicator, China also has approximately a 50-50 proportion in consumer vs. commercial PCs, compared to the 65-35 percent ratio for the rest of the world.

A third pattern unique to the China PC market is the preferred notebook display size of 14 inches, which accounts for more than 70 percent of notebook PC shipments in the country. For the rest of the world, the 14-inch makes up less than 30 percent.

A fourth pattern of note is the attach rate of PCs with a pre-installed operating system, especially for notebooks. While mature PC markets in other parts of the world claim a 90 percent attach rate, the proportion for China comes out to lower than 50 percent, with the ratio even lower in the desktop PC market.

Despite such exclusive behavior, the China PC space shares one common trait with the worldwide PC market. Like the rest of the world, demand in China remains weak as consumers migrate to using mobile devices like cellphones. China’s PC market is projected to grow only by 3 to 4 percent this year.

Even so, a vast market opportunity continues to exist for PCs in the country, in the form of potential first-time buyers mostly residing in the countryside. The government already plans this year to invest some 40 trillion yuan—equivalent to some $6.4 trillion—to build rural infrastructure in the next 10 years, and PC original equipment manufacturers can take advantage of the initiative to build out and expand from the cities, IHS believes.

China is also on track to retain its position as the largest PC market in the world for the foreseeable future unchallenged and alone—further providing PC brands a rare opportunity for expansion, counter to the myriad travails they face in the rest of the world.

Demand for 4-inch or larger AMOLED panels has continued to increase in the fourth quarter of 2012 thanks to strong growth in the market for high-end smartphones with large screens, such as the Galaxy S and Note series by Samsung Electronics, according to a recent report released by Displaybank. The larger size group made up 88 percent of total AMOLED panel shipments, which amounted to 41 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012: In detail, 4.x-inch panels accounted for 65.1 percent and 5.x-inch ones 22.8 percent.

In particular, shipments of 5.x-inch AMOLED panels hiked in the fourth quarter of 2012, expanding its market share for the third consecutive quarter, to 22.8 percent of the total. It is a rather rapid growth, considering that 5.3-inch AMOLED panel was first released in the third quarter of 2011, thanks to the popularity of larger-screen smartphones. This is in stark contrast to 3.x-inch AMOLED panels whose market share plunged to 11.6 percent in total shipments in the last quarter of 2012 from more than 60 percent in the first quarter of 2011. Along with the 4.x-inch sector, which takes the majority of total AMOLED shipments, 5.x-inch panels are expected to become the main display size group in the market.

By application, demand of AMOLED panels for mobile phones accounted of 96 percent of the total AMOLED panel shipments in the last quarter of 2012, up from 86 percent in the first quarter of the year. Mobile phones have contributed to the rapid growth of the market for AMOLED panels, but this caused concerns about the market’s too much dependence on one application. The trend also indicates how difficult for the AMOLED technology to enter the mid-to-large-sized panel market.

Initiated by the arrival of Google Glass and magnified by Google’s efforts to promote application development for the product, the global market for smart glasses could amount to almost 10 million units from 2012 through 2016.

Shipments of smart glasses may rise to as high 6.6 million units in 2016, up from just 50,000 in 2012, for a total of 9.4 million units for the five-year period, according to an upside forecast from IMS Research, now part of IHS Inc. Growth this year will climb 150 percent to 124,000 shipments, mostly driven by sales to developers, as shown in the figure below. Expansion will really begin to accelerate in 2014 with the initial public availability of Google Glass, as shipment growth powers up to 250 percent, based on the optimistic forecast.

Google Glass this month began shipping to application developers who registered as early backers and paid the $1,500 price tag. This is expected to spur innovations in applications that should take Glass from early adopters to the mass market. As the developers get to work and Google encourages venture capitalists to back them, shipments will begin to surge to high volumes, according to the forecast.

However, the success of Google Glass will depend primarily on the applications developed for it. If developers fail to produce compelling software and uses for the devices, shipments could be significantly lower during the next several years.

“The applications are far more critical than the hardware when it comes to the success of Google Glass,” said Theo Ahadome, senior analyst at IHS. “In fact, the hardware is much less relevant to the growth of Google Glass than for any other personal communications device in recent history. This is because the utility of Google Glass is not readily apparent, so everything will depend on the appeal of the apps. This is why the smart glass market makes sense for a software-oriented organization like Google, despite the company’s limited previous success in developing hardware. Google is betting the house that developers will produce some compelling applications for Glass.”

The glass is half full

According to the optimistic scenario, developers will succeed in producing augmented reality applications for smart glasses that provide the user with information that can be safely and conveniently be integrated into casual use. Such applications typically are known as augmented reality, which involves adding a layer of computer-generated data to real-world people, places and things.

“The true success of Glass will be when it can provide some information to users not apparent when viewing people, places or things,” Ahadome said. “This information may include live updates for travel, location reviews and recommendations, nutritional information and matching personal preferences, and previous encounters to aid decision making. The upside for smart glasses will arise when they become a powerful information platform. In many ways, this is exactly what Google already does via other mediums, and also is why the upside scenario seems more likely.”

Broken glass

Under a more pessimistic scenario, IHS forecasts that only about 1 million smart glasses will be shipped through 2016.

According to this outlook, applications for smart glasses will be limited to some of those already displayed by Google in its Glass marketing. These include scenarios where smart glasses become more of a wearable camera device than a true augmented reality system. In this case, smart glasses will be mainly used for recording sports and other non-casual events, like jumping out of a plane, as demonstrated at the Google I/O developer conference in 2012. 

However, Glass will face competition from alternative wearable camera devices already in the market, such as GoPro Hero or Recon MOD Live.

While the wearable camera market was worth more than $200 million in 2012, it is not the multibillion-dollar market that smart glasses can achieve with wider applicability.

“The less frequently consumers interact with any personal communications device, the less valuable it becomes,” Ahadome observed. “If smart glasses become devices that are used only occasionally, rather than all the time, they become less attractive and desirable to consumers.”

In recent years, TFT-LCD technology has dominated the display panel market, everything from small, medium and large screens, to the point where all other rival display technologies such as e-paper, PDP, and CRT have steadily been losing their positioning. Amidst this trend, only the AMOLED panel market, led by Samsung Display, emerged as the most formidable competitor to TFT-LCD, showing a steady and fast growth.

Several fast-moving panel manufacturers see the potential in the AMOLED panel business and are planning to enter this market in the near future. Despite such interest in the market, only a handful of companies, including Samsung Display, LG Display, and Sony, are successfully producing on a large scale.

This state can be attributed to several obstacles. The first is the higher degree of technical difficulty in producing AMOLED panels compared to TFT-LCDs. Even with successful AMOLED production, toppling TFT-LCDs from their current dominant position of performance and cost advantageousness is a daunting task. In addition, the market is trending toward bigger screens with higher resolutions, which make penetrating the competitive AMOLED market even harder because the late comers have to develop both standard and cutting-edge technologies at the same time.

As a result, AMOLED manufacturers will strive to penetrate the market with diverse strategic planning this year in order to overcome the various technological and competitive obstacles. More specifically, the majority of manufacturers already producing TFT-LCD panels are busy reckoning gains and losses of making AMOLED panels alongside and how they will be able to maximize profits with minimized investment. 

The paradigm shift of the small and medium-sized OLED manufacturing process and substrate process deserves attention in 2013. In the small and medium-sized OLED manufacturing process, open mask-applied WOLED structure is being widely attempted, since it is easy to implement even though the performance is inferior when compared to high precision deposition methods, such as traditional fine metal mask evaporation-applied RGB light-emitting structure, LITI, and ink jet printing. There is also an attempt to produce unbreakable AMOLED panels with a goal to replace flatbed glass used for substrate and encapsulation layer with plastic and thin-film coating, respectively. If realized, the emergence of such an unbreakable AMOLED screen should stand as a groundbreaking innovation for the display panel market as a whole along with the related technology applications sector.

Displaybank has researched the issues and strategies for each and every player in the AMOLED market and published its timely report “AMOLED Panel Makers’ Business Strategy and Market Forecast” in order for the companies to safely navigate through obstacles. The report should offer firms insight into penetrating the competitive AMOLED panel market with helpful and individualized strategies.

The same material that formed the first primitive transistors more than 60 years ago can be modified in a new way to advance future electronics, according to a new study.

Chemists at Ohio State University have developed the technology for making a one-atom-thick sheet of germanium, and found that it conducts electrons more than ten times faster than silicon and five times faster than conventional germanium.

The material’s structure is closely related to that of graphene—a much-touted two-dimensional material comprised of single layers of carbon atoms. As such, graphene shows unique properties compared to its more common multilayered counterpart, graphite.  Graphene has yet to be used commercially, but experts have suggested that it could one day form faster computer chips, and maybe even function as a superconductor, so many labs are working to develop it.

 “Most people think of graphene as the electronic material of the future,” Goldberger said. “But silicon and germanium are still the materials of the present. Sixty years’ worth of brainpower has gone into developing techniques to make chips out of them. So we’ve been searching for unique forms of silicon and germanium with advantageous properties, to get the benefits of a new material but with less cost and using existing technology.”

In a paper published online in the journal ACS Nano, he and his colleagues describe how they were able to create a stable, single layer of germanium atoms. In this form, the crystalline material is called germanane.

Researchers have tried to create germanane before. This is the first time anyone has succeeded at growing sufficient quantities of it to measure the material’s properties in detail, and demonstrate that it is stable when exposed to air and water.

In nature, germanium tends to form multilayered crystals in which each atomic layer is bonded together; the single-atom layer is normally unstable. To get around this problem, Goldberger’s team created multi-layered germanium crystals with calcium atoms wedged between the layers. Then they dissolved away the calcium with water, and plugged the empty chemical bonds that were left behind with hydrogen. The result: they were able to peel off individual layers of germanane.

Studded with hydrogen atoms, germanane is even more chemically stable than traditional silicon. It won’t oxidize in air and water, as silicon does. That makes germanane easy to work with using conventional chip manufacturing techniques.

The primary thing that makes germanane desirable for optoelectronics is that it has what scientists call a “direct band gap,” meaning that light is easily absorbed or emitted. Materials such as conventional silicon and germanium have indirect band gaps, meaning that it is much more difficult for the material to absorb or emit light.

“When you try to use a material with an indirect band gap on a solar cell, you have to make it pretty thick if you want enough energy to pass through it to be useful. A material with a direct band gap can do the same job with a piece of material 100 times thinner,” Goldberger said.

The first-ever transistors were crafted from germanium in the late 1940s, and they were about the size of a thumbnail. Though transistors have grown microscopic since then—with millions of them packed into every computer chip—germanium still holds potential to advance electronics, the study showed.

According to the researchers’ calculations, electrons can move through germanane ten times faster through silicon, and five times faster than through conventional germanium. The speed measurement is called electron mobility.

With its high mobility, germanane could thus carry the increased load in future high-powered computer chips.

“Mobility is important, because faster computer chips can only be made with faster mobility materials,” Golberger said. “When you shrink transistors down to small scales, you need to use higher mobility materials or the transistors will just not work,” Goldberger explained.

Next, the team is going to explore how to tune the properties of germanane by changing the configuration of the atoms in the single layer.

Lead author of the paper was Ohio State undergraduate chemistry student Elizabeth Bianco, who recently won the first place award for this research at the nationwide nanotechnology competition NDConnect, hosted by the University of Notre Dame. Other co-authors included Sheneve Butler and Shishi Jiang of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Oscar Restrepo and Wolfgang Windl of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

The research was supported in part by an allocation of computing time from the Ohio Supercomputing Center, with instrumentation provided by the Analytical Surface Facility in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Ohio State University Undergraduate Instrumental Analysis Program. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, the Center for Emergent Materials at Ohio State, and the university’s Materials Research Seed Grant Program.

SPIE leaders said they were encouraged to see proposed increases in funds for scientific research and development and a greater emphasis on STEM education in President Obama’s 2014 budget proposal released last Wednesday. At the same time, they stressed the importance of making applied research high priority, and expressed concerns about some funding levels.

The White House proposal includes an 8.4 percent increase over the 2012 enacted level for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Funding would rise for the NSF to an annual $7.6 billion. The budget for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science would increase by 5.7 percent, to $5 billion.

All told, the President’s 2014 budget proposes $143 billion for federal research and development, providing a 1 percent increase over 2012 levels for all R&D, and an increase of 9 percent for non-defense R&D.

“While the budget continues this Adminstration’s unflinching support for science and recognition of the importance of photonics to our future economy and health, I have some concerns,” said Eugene Arthurs, CEO of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. “In these times of constraint, It is very encouraging to see proposed increases for NSF, DOE science, and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), and the investment in the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) earth observations program is overdue. But it is disturbing to see both NASA and NIH R&D budgets reduced, in real terms.”

Arthurs said that the decrease for NIH is particularly troubling because health issues are changing with demographics and risks are expanding with global disease mobility. He cited recognition by NIH director Francis Collins of the potential for imaging coupled with the power and possible economies from more use of data tools as ways to address those challenges.

A strong proposal, Arthurs said, is the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative announced by the President. The initiative would be launched with approximately $100 million in funding for research supported by the NIH, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and NSF.

“The decrease in real terms, compared with 2012 budgets, for defense basic and applied research and advanced technology development is worrying,” Arthurs said. “We need to better understand the deep cuts in defense development when this is where our security has come from and also where for decades there has been much spillover into our tech industry.”

To remain competitive in the global economy, the nation would benefit from even stronger support of applied research, Arthurs said.

“Canada and the European Union are among regions that have established policies focusing priority on applied research, and for good reason,” he said. “Applied research is concerned with creating real value through solving specific problems ― creating new energy sources, finding new cures for disease, and strengthening the security and stability of communication systems. Its metrics are improvements in the functioning of society as a whole and in the quality of individual human lives, not those of laboratory animals, and in patents and new inventions that spark economic growth, not just journal citations.”

That focus on applications is reflected in work being done by the National Photonics Initiative (NPI) committee to raise awareness of the positive force of photonics on the economy and encourage policy that promotes its development. Born out of the National Academies report issued last year on “Optics and Photonics, Essential Technologies for Our Nation,” the NPI is being driven by five scientific societies: SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics; OSA; LIA; IEEE Photonics Society; and APS.

The President’s budget proposal also moves 90 STEM programs across 11 different agencies under the jurisdiction of the Department of Education. This "reorganization" aims to "improve the delivery, impact, and visibility of STEM efforts," the budget document said.

Once a white-hot PC product that sold in the tens of millions of units annually, netbook computers are now marking their final days, with the rise of tablets causing their shipments to wind down to virtually zero after next year, according to an IHS iSuppli Compute Electronics Market Tracker Report from information and analytics provider IHS.

Shipments of netbooks this year are forecast to amount to just 3.97 million units, a plunge off the cliff of 72 percent from 14.13 million units in 2012. The market for the small, inexpensive laptops had steadily climbed for three years from the time the devices were first introduced in 2007, peaking in 2010 when shipments hit a high of 32.14 million units. Since then, however, the netbook space has imploded and gone into decline—fast.

Next year will be the last hurrah for netbooks on the market, with shipments amounting to a mere 264,000 units. By 2015, netbook shipments will be down to zero, as shown in the attached figure.

“Netbooks shot to popularity immediately after launch because they were optimized for low cost, delivering what many consumers believed as acceptable computer performance,” said Craig Stice, senior principal analyst for compute platforms at IHS. “Initially intended for light productivity tasks such as web browsing and email, netbooks eventually became more powerful, taking advantage of a mature PC technology that allowed cost-effective implementation of various functionalities. And though never equaling the performance of full-fledged notebooks and lacking full laptop features like an optical drive, netbooks at one point began taking market share away from their more powerful cousins. However, netbooks began their descent to oblivion with the introduction in 2010 of Apple’s iPad.”

The following year, netbook shipments dived 34 percent on what would become a trend of irreversible decline.

“The iPad and other tablets came in a new form factor that excited consumers while also offering improved computing capabilities, leading to a massive loss of interest in netbooks,” Stice said.

At the other end of the spectrum, high-end laptops were also making their appearance. Although much more costly than netbooks, they offered premium performance. Squeezed in between, netbooks could only pass off pricing as their strong point, losing out in other benchmarks that consumers deemed important, including computing power, ease of use such as touch-screen capability, and overall appeal.

From the supply end of production, the major original equipment manufacturers of notebooks will have already terminated netbook production at this point. Whatever production is left is expected to be limited, or manufacturers will simply be shipping last-time builds to satisfy contractual obligations to customers.

Mobile PCs also get hit by media tablets

Mobile PCs retained the largest share of the overall PC market in the fourth quarter last year—the latest time for which full figures are available—compared to desktop PCs and entry-level servers. Mobile PCs had about 63 percent share, compared to 34 percent for desktops and 3 percent for entry-level servers.

Nonetheless, mobile PCs continued to be sideswiped by the ongoing popularity of tablets, and new Ultrabooks and similar ultrathin PCs have yet to take off to the extent hoped for by manufacturers.

Among the computer brands, Hewlett-Packard was No. 1 during the fourth quarter with a nearly 18 percent  share of total PC shipments. China’s Lenovo was second, followed by Dell in third place, Acer in fourth, and Asus—which introduced the first netbook in 2007—in fifth.

Landing in sixth place was Toshiba, which climbed one spot from the third quarter, sending Apple one rung down to seventh. Apple struggled during the last quarter of 2012 because of constraints related to panel supply for the company’s new iMac desktop system, which kept Apple PC shipments down.

In eighth place was Samsung, trailing Apple by a tenth of a percentage point, followed by Sony and Fujitsu rounding out the Top 10.

Cambrios Technologies Corporation, a developer of nanowire-based solutions for the transparent and flexible conductor markets, today announced the establishment of its branch office in Tokyo, Japan, and the appointment of Takashi Murayama as Country Manager for Japan.

"We are seeing growth opportunities in Japan and are already shipping from our ClearOhmTM product line," said John LeMoncheck, Cambrios’ president and CEO. "Our newly created Japan office will support customers using our cost efficient transparent conductors in applications such as All-In-One computers and other touch screen enabled devices."

To oversee sales and distribution of Cambrios’ products in Japan, the company has named Takashi Murayama as its Country Manager. Prior to joining Cambrios, Murayama worked as country manager for various leading companies in the microprocessor, communications and nanotechnology industries, including Transmeta, Conexant Systems, Beceem Communications and Unidym. He also spent 19 years in sales and marketing management roles with Intel Japan. Murayama holds a Bachelors of Science degree in electrical engineering from Kagoshima University in Kagoshima, Japan.

Cambrios is known for its first product, its ClearOhm coating material, which produces a transparent, conductive film by wet processing with significantly higher optical and electrical performance than currently used materials such as indium tin oxide. Applications of ClearOhm coating material include transparent electrodes for touch screens, EMI shielding, OLED displays, e-paper, OLED lighting and thin film photovoltaics.

Glass is everywhere: from MEMS, CMOS image sensors and power to memory, logic IC and microfluidics

Glass is widely used in everyday life and found in large quantities in many industries, such as flat panel display applications. Over the last few years, glass has gained considerable interest from the semiconductor industry due to its very attractive electrical, physical and chemical properties, as well as its prospects for a relevant and cost-efficient solution. The application scope of glass substrates in the semiconductor field is broad and highly diversified.

The demand for glass is growing, and glass has already been adapted for various and unique wafer-processing functionalities and platforms supporting a wide range of end-applications. For example, WLCapping is driven mainly by MEMS and CMOS image sensors. In the coming years, the availability of other glass functionalities such as 3D TGV/2.5 D interposer in conjunction with end-applications like memory and logic IC will be the driving force for growth, creating new challenges and new technical developments along the way.

Mainly driven by the wafer-level packaging industry, the glass wafer market is expected to grow from $158 million in 2012 to $1.3B by 2018, at a CAGR of ~41 percent over the next five years

“Initially driven by CMOS image sensor and MEMS applications, this growing industry will be supported by relevant end-applications such as LED, memory and logic IC, where glass is on its way to being commercialized. In terms of wafers shipped, a 4x glass wafer growth is expected in the semiconductor industry over the next five years, achieving more than 15 million 8 inch equivalent wafer starts per year by 2018,” explains Amandine Pizzagalli, market and technology analyst, Equipment & Materials Manufacturing, at Yole Développement.

Glass substrate: a key enabler of various functionalities in the semiconductor field

The glass WLCapping platform is a mature functionality already adopted with significant volume in CMOS Image Sensors, where more than 3.3 million glass caps were shipped in 2012. This market is expected to grow slowly, with a CAGR of 14 percent from 2012-2018, mainly supported by MEMS devices impacted by the request for further miniaturization. On the flip side, the glass market for WLOptics will likely decline from 2015-2018 due to the development of competing technologies.

All of this said, we expect to see strong growth in the glass market, mainly supported by two emerging WLP platforms: with a CAGR of 110 percent and 70 percent respectively, the glass-type 2.5D interposer emerging platform and the carrier wafer will be glass’s fastest-growing fields over the next five years, since glass offers the best value proposition in terms of cost, flexibility, mechanical rigidity and surface flatness.

If glass is qualified for 2.5D interposer functionality, the glass market could exceed $1B revenue by 2018. However, it’s still unclear how BEOL wafer fabs will choose glass over the current silicon technology used for logic IC applications (for the 2.5D/3D SOC and system partitioning areas), but the glass variety of 2.5D interposer substrates is expected to significantly impact future glass wafer demand, and it’s obvious that the 2.5D glass interposer will attract many newcomers.

The use of glass interposers in packaging will certainly be on the HVM roadmap within a few years.

glass wafer market

Glass substrate: The top five players hold almost 80 percent of the market

In the semiconductor industry, the glass substrate market is split amongst five main suppliers. Schott (G), Tecnisco (JP), PlanOptik (G), Bullen (US) and Corning (US) will share more than 70 percent $158M glass substrate market this year, driven mainly by demand for WLCapping.

In the midst of this growing market, semiconductor glass suppliers are trying to differentiate themselves by proposing a variety of glass substrate material properties with a good CTE, solid thermal properties and no polishing/grinding steps required, which would result in reduced costs.

Many glass substrate suppliers such as AGC, Corning and HOYA are expected to increase their business in the next few years since they are quite aggressive in 2.5D interposers and glass carrier wafers, and are expected to ramp-up into high volume production. Since the big players are already deeply entrenched in the glass market, it will be very challenging for a new entrant to break through in the foreseeable future.