By Dr. Phil Garrou, Contributing Editor

Continuing our look at the 2016 SEMI European 3D Summit.

McKinsey

A very interesting chart from McKinsey on 2014 economic profit in the microelectronics industry (below). It is clear that very few companies are responsible for most of the economic profit.

The big 5 of Intel, TSMC, Qualcomm, TI and Samsung contributed > 70% of the entire industries economic profit for the last 15 years.

The following are the top 10 2014 assembly and test companies.

While market share is key in most semiconductor industry segments, there is no such link in assembly and test. Partnerships and portfolio appear to be the most important factors I assembly & test.

Their key trends for Assembly & test are:

None of these should be a surprise to readers of IFTLE.

Fraunhoffer Inst

In a joint presentation by the different Fraunhoffer Institutes in Germany, Andy Heinig show the following comparison of their SiO2 and polymer based processes.

They indicate that the required number of routing layers not only depending on component complexity (i.e., pin count, pitch), but also on interposer material composition ( i.e. polymer vs SiO2 based)

– Polymer-based interposers with increased width and spacing of interconnect require a minimum of 3 metal layers

– Finer L/S of SiO2-based interposers allows routing on a single metallization layer

– Different consideration for power/ground nets (larger line/space) necessary

3M

The 3M wafer support system for thinning and backside processing has been around for several years. Their standard process is shown below.

They are also developing a thermal cure adhesive that can be mechanically debonded. This eliminates the LTHC layer and the laser module. Properties are shown below.

For all the latest in 3DIC and other advanced packaging, stay linked to IFTLE…