Flip chip packages are the fastest growing area of the semiconductor
packaging, with growth rates over the past 5 years of 90%. For the
foreseeable future, growth rates are seen to be 48% per year, arriving
at more than 1 billion modules by 2005. Some forecasts are even
higher.
Today, traditional wire bonding is still about one-third of the
market, according to Dataquest. But growth in flip chip is being
spurred on by requirements for thinner packaging as well as the
economics or driving per-pin connection costs down from the $0.025 -
$0.04 range into the $0.01 range. Even if the lower pin costs are
realized, flip chip packages with 2,600 leads will still generate more
than $25 per package for the vendors. The demand for thinner
packaging has largely been driven by the cellphone and consumer
electronics industry, according to the leading interconnect company in
the business, Amkor Technology.
Market shares often vary greatly from research company to research
company based on the starting assumptions for the semiconductor
industry. Some estimates are that 60 billion (Prismark Research)
integrated circuits (ICs) were sold in 2000; other estimates are as
high as 86 billion (IC Insights).
Here's what the leading analysts say about flip chip packaging:
· the first use of flip-chip packaging was in a voltage regulator for
1969 Pontiacs by Delco Electronics, according to Chip Scale Review, a
semiconductor publication.
· by 1997, flip chip usage had risen to 10 million units per year,
according to Prismark Partners, a semiconductor research firm. Over
the last 5 years, flip chip in package (chip scale packages and bump
gate array) has been the fastest growing segment of the business,
growing about 90 percent per year to 280 million units.
· Prismark predicts continued growth at the 48% per year level to
around 1 billion units in 2005.
· Flip chip is predicted by Prismark to continue to rise in market
share among chip scale packages and attain 25% share by next year.
· Advanced Packaging, a semiconductor equipment publication, predicts
flip chip to continue growth at a high rate (about 50% per year),
containing 12 billion ICs in 2005. The forecast is based on Prismark
research and anticipates more system-on-a-chip packages putting
multiple ICs in a single package.
· Flip chip is the highest growth area in 2002, with a 21 percent
growth rate in equipment being sold (note that this is an equipment
forecast -- not forecast for output in packaging). Virtually all
other packaging sectors were down, according to Dataquest.
Though they don't publicly break out their flip chip revenues, one way
to track this business is to following the leading packaging
companies. According to Dr. Subash Khadpe, of the Semiconductor
Technology Center, these 10 companies have more than 65% of the
independent packaging market:
Amkor Technology, $2.01 billion (2000)
ASE Group, $1.625 billion
SPIL, $603 million
ChipPAC, $494 million
ASAT, $375 million
Carsem, $375 million
ChipMOS, $360 million
STATS, $331 million
OSE, $320 million
AIT, $284 million
Here are some of the key references to articles on flip chip and
market share.
From Electronic News, "Package, Die and Socket Tales" (July 15, 2002):
http://www.e-insite.net/electronicnews/index.asp?layout=article&articleId=CA233246
Amkor Technology's press release "Amkor to Install Wafer Bumping for
Flip Chip" (March, 2000):
http://www.amkor.com/News/PressReleases/ShowPR.cfm?ID=92
Prismark's "Array Packages Revisited" (February, 2001):
http://www.prismark.com/recent.html
Chip Scale Review's "Status of the Worldwide Packaging Foundry
Industry" (May-June, 2001), which is a good article on participants in
the packaging industry:
www.chipscalereview.com/issues/0501/f3_01.html
Using Google at three major web sites to search for "flip chip" with
the "search site" option will yield lots of background information:
Fleck Research web page:
http://www.fleckresearch.com/home.htm
Chip Scale Review's web page:
http://www.chipscalereview.com/docs/home.html
Prismark Partner's web site:
www.prismark.com
Gartner Group's Dataquest business unit also follows this marketplace.
For additional reports available for purchase, you can search "flip
chip" at the Gartner website:
http://www4.gartner.com/Init
The last analysis that I did of semiconductor packaging was way back
in 1980 for Hutchinson Technology (of the lead-frame business). It
was fun to get back up to speed!
Best regards,
Omnivorous-GA |
