Continuing our look at the 2013 GaTech Interposer Conference.

Amkor

Ron Huemoeller of Amkor addressed interposer use, defining the markets and materials options as follows:

Amkor projects that in the high end silicon will dominate; in the mid-end, silicon will be prominent and organic /glass may play a role; in the low end, organic, or low cost glass or silicon if they exist will play a role.

Silicon Interposers

Product Applications

– Gaming, HDTV, mobile tablets, computing, servers

– High end graphics cards will be the initial focus of HBM memory integration

– mobile space has the potential to follow based on availability of low cost solutions

Visible and Anticipated Demand

– continued low volume production of FPGAs and ASICs

– moderate volumes for high end graphics cards; HBM cost/availability driven

– high volumes for mobile; interposer cost driven at less than $0.01 per sq mm.

Market Longevity

– expect to have a very long life cycle

– long term continued use through deconstruction of very high end node logic to address system level cost and power related memory integration issues.

Amkor describes the silicon interposer supply chain

–  Current

– TSMC – not supplying to the industry

– UMC and Global Foundries – both have limited capacity and neither desires to be a merchant supplier

– Future

– Yet unannounced merchant supplier

– use of depreciated equipment and excess capacity

– lowers cost vs tier 1 foundries

– supply interposer without desire to bundle chip fab.

Organic Interposer Sources:

– Tier 1 Shinko, SEMCO

– 2/2 (L/S) 10/22 (via/pad); very limited sampling

– Tier 2 Kyocera

– 5/5 (L/S); 18/30 (vias/pads); very limited sampling

– Tier 3 Kinsus, Unimicron

– early development

GlobalFoundries

Dave McCann of GlobalFoundries examined market needs for interposers. McCann used the latest Gartner data on SoC costs to point out that development costs for a 10nm design are expected to approach $400MM.

GF again made the case that “DIS-integration” can actually offset scaling costs, i.e.:

GF indicates that the yield of high density interposers is high (“..approaching 100%”), even for  full retical sized; 4 metal layer top side, 1 metal layer backside structures.

GF has come up with the following roadmap for silicon, high density laminate and glass.

Like Amkor, GF has mapped 2.5D requirements by market space and come up with the following.

Also similar to Amkor GF pointed out that the industry needs a low cost high volume source of  high density interposers. Although showing their capabilities for interposer fabrication, interestingly they did not offer themselves up as the solution.

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