By Dr. Phil Garrou, Contributing Editor
Consolidation
One may say that IFTLE has been obsessed with consolidation for the last few years. The reasons for this become obvious when one looks at the increase in recent activity. There are typically ~25 or so acquisitions a year. In 2015, there will 2X that number and the deals, in general are ~10X larger than in the past.
IC Insights has recently pulled together the major M&A activity over the last year.
In addition, several large M&A agreements announced last year have closed in 2015 including:
- RF Micro Devices and TriQuint Semiconductor officially completed their Qorvo merger
- Qualcomm completed its acquisition of CSR in August 2015
- Cypress completed its acquisition and merger with Spansion in March 015
- Infineon completed its acquisition of International Rectifier in January 2015
- IBM completed the sale of its Microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries in July 2015
IC Insights notes that the unprecedented M&A activity is indicative of IC suppliers experiencing slower sales in their existing market segments and the need to broaden their businesses to stay in favor with investors. IFTLE favors the explanation that we have published previously, i.e. many of the segments of our industry are entering late stage 3 and stage 4 where consolidation is the norm. (See IFTLE 241, “Simply Obeying the Laws of Economics”.)
ASE Buys 25 percent of SPIL Stock
Following up on our story about ASE attempting to purchase 25 percent of SPIL (see IFTLE 252, “ASE makes bid for SPIL shares…”), ASE announced on September 22 it has purchased 25 percent shares of SPIL shares, achieving its acquisition goal.
SPIL reiterated that a SPIL-ASE tie-up would not create much synergy, since 85 percent of its customers overlap with ASE’s. “… the acquisition will cause order losses as customers will allocate some orders to a third supplier rather than put all their eggs in one basket,” SPIL stated.
ASE noted that now being a major shareholder of SPIL, the company will be exploring avenues of cooperation with SPIL but otherwise, “ ASE will not intervene in SPIL’s operations and therefore, cannot affect the rights and interests of SPILs current employees.” [Link]
Embedded and Wafer Level Package Technology Forum at Semicon Taiwan
Continuing our look at Semicon Taiwan 2015, let’s begin our look at the Embedded and Wafer Level Package Technology Forum led by Mr. Albert Lan (left), Senior Director, SPIL. The theme of the forum was System Integration & Package Solutions for Portable/Wearable/IoT Devices. Mediatek discussed “Packaging Breakthroughs in Wearable Devices”. Unimicron gave a great review of “Innovative Substrate Technology …”; J Devices discussed their panel level processing efforts and Fraunhoffer IZM discussed results of their fan out panel level processing.
Mediatek
Overall Mediatek sees IoT wearables as requiring:
- miniaturization which can be achieved with embedding;
- being substrate less for low cost which is achieved by fan out packaging; and
- being manufactured on a panel process to minimize cost.
Mediatek discussed Aster (MT2502A) a monolithic low-power CMOS chip integrating power management unit, analog baseband and radio circuitry. Based on an ARM RISC processor, it provides a platform for class 12 MODEM and leading-edge multimedia applications.
It also features a Bluetooth transceiver and an FM receiver supporting both audio broadcast de-modulation and RDS/RBDS data decoding. The MT2502A device is offered in a 5.4mm×6.2mm, 143-ball, 0.4mm pitch, TFBGA package. MT2502A provides always-on mode to optimize the low power performance for wearable device. [Link]
Another interesting development is their antenna on package (AoP) technology which they claim offers smaller form factor, better performance and faster time to market, although one must be careful about a properly designed keep-out-zone and proper design to minimize EM interference.
We’ll finish up with Semicon Taiwan 2015 next week.
For all the latest in 3DIC and other advanced packaging stay linked to IFTLE.
