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Advanced Packaging Technology Seen in Recent Cellular Phones
Howard Curtis, Portelligent
Larry Gilg, Die Products Consortium (DPC)
Advanced packaging technology using bare die and chip-scale packages h as rapidly developed from laboratory curiosity to a mainstream enabler for portable consumer electronic produc ts , including in particular cellular han ds e ts . The maturation of this technology is proceeding quickly, and will have a broad impact on the electronics supply chain in the future.
The growing acceptance of multi-chip packaging in consumer electronic produc ts is driven by the requirement for extremely compact handheld systems that simultaneously provide ever more functionality for the user, as evident in the cellular phone market. The benefi ts accrued by incorporating multi-chip package memory into cell phones - a lead application of multi-chip-package produc ts in the consumer electronics domain - have reached critical m as s, creating an as sembly infr as tructure that now is providing economies of scale to match traditional packaging processes.
The authors report on a Portelligent Strategic Study on tren ds in advanced packaging in consumer electronics produc ts that drew on the Portelligent "Product Profile Datab as e" as a primary resource. The Portelligent Product Profile Datab as e contains quantitative data on over 350 consumer electronic produc ts that the company h as analyzed using i ts "product teardown" methodologies over the period 2002 to 2005. The IC tables in the datab as e describe over 14,000 devices that Portelligent product analys ts have encountered in the course of this analytical work, including an incre as ing proportion of occurrences of these ICs in multi-chip packaging configurations.
Among the conclusions of the "Tren ds in Advanced Packaging in Consumer Electronic Produc ts " are:
- Memory devices in cellular handsets have been the leading-edge of high-volume multi-chip packages for consumer electronic markets. Among handsets analyzed by Portelligent, in 2004 for the first time the proportion of multi-chip memory packages exceeded that of single-chip packages.
- System-in-package technology, wherein the multiple die in a package include disparate elemen ts (typically logic and memory), are also gaining traction in the consumer electronics product stream. Again, cellular handsets are the bellwether product domain.
- Although cellular handsets clearly represent the leading application domain among the product families covered by Portelligent, multi-chip package devices are beginning to appear in other domains as well. Digital still camer as are an example.
- The take-up of "package-on-package" SiP technology in applications in consumer electronic produc ts clearly lags stacked die package SiP. However, we are beginning to see examples of package-on-package SiP in the product stream as well.
In addition to trends in multi-chip packaging, the authors will present several concrete examples of recent multi-chip package applications in consumer electronic products .
Larry Gilg is the managing director of the Die Products Consortium. Larry has been managing projects within the known good die (KGD) industry for the past 12 years. He is the author of a number of articles and presentations, and has presented tutorials on KGD and SiP technologies at conferences. Larry received his Master’s degree in Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, and is a registered professional engineer in Texas.
Howard Curtis is VP, Global Services at Portelligent, Inc. Before moving to Portelligent as one of the original founders, Howard was Director of Global Technology Services at MCC from 1992 to 2000. Howard has a BA in Asian Studies from Princeton University, an MBA from Cornell, and an MS in Software Engineering from the University of Texas, Austin.