By Dr. Phil Garrou, Contributing Editor

For those of you who haven’t seen the latest IC Insights list of 2015 foundry players, I have reprinted it below. TSMC is the leader with $26.4 billion in sales. TSMC sales were over 5x that of # 2 ranked GlobalFoundries (even with the addition of IBM’s chip business in the second half of 2015) and ~12x the sales of # 5 SMIC.  There are now only two IDM foundries in the ranking namely Samsung and Fujitsu. Without Apple, TSMC’s foundry sales would have declined by 2% last year and without the addition of IBM’s sales in the second half of last year, GlobalFoundries’ sales would also have declined by 2% in 2015. The top 13 players now account for 93%of all foundry sales. As everyone now understands, more consolidation is to come….get ready for it.

Continuing our look at presentations form the 2016 IMAPS Device Packaging Conference

In the IMAPS Global Business Council session, Bill McClean of IC Insights updated the attendees on recent IC trends including recent moves by Chinese entities to acquire a position in the global IC Industry. [ see IFTLE 238 ASE & the Apple watch, ASE / TDK JV; China: the Wild Card ]

In addition to the list below, he lists the following as rumored full or partial acquisition targets by Chinese entities: AMD, GlobalFoundries, MediaTek, Micron, Qualcomm, Renesas, SK Hynix, SPIL, TSMC and Toshiba.

JECT (STATSChipPAC)

The STATS presentation on SiP contained the following interesting slide depicting technologies vs applications overlaid on required L/S.

K&S

Strothman of K&S gave a presentations covering process options for low cost thermo-compression bonding (TCB). Stacked memory products are the highest volume products assembled today using TCB.

• Micron HMC assembled on laminate with C2S (chip to substrate)TC bonders
• Hynix HBM assembled on interposers using C2W (chip to wafer) bonders

Process options are shown below:

The cost of TCB becomes competitive with mass reflow bonding at high UPH.

Thus the question becomes how to achieve high UPH. Two key approaches can improve process UPH

• Reduce temperature excursions for the bond head
  • Enable higher die transfer temperature
    • TC-CUF flux dip requires lower bondhead temp
    • TC-NCF needs lower transfer temp to prevent film damage
  • Hot touch down for TC-CUF
• Remove sequential process steps
  • Flux dip process for each die adds time

KNS reports an optimized process through reduced temperature range and higher die transfer temp resulting in TC-NCF process at 2000 UPH and TC-CUF process at 2500 UPH significantly reducing overall costs.

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