ELECTRONICS.CA PUBLICATIONS, the electronics industry market research and knowledge network, announces the availability of a new report dedicated to Wafer Level Packaging: Wafer Level Packaging 2009 report. This report presents detailed technical and market status and forecasts on WLP technologies and applications. Market figures and growth rates are provided in units and wafers for each market segment over the 2008‐2013 period. Numerous application examples are given, recent technical developments and options are detailed, and industry‐wide technology roadmaps are presented.

 

Wafer Level Packaging is a confirmed high growth trend in the semiconductor packaging industry. Wafer Level Chip Scale Packaging (WLCSP), or the direct Bonding of bumped integrated circuits (IC’s) on printed circuit boards (PCB’s) as one of the most visible expressions of WLP, is undoubtedly the fastest growing package type in the whole industry. The research forecasts that it will exceed 10 billion units per year by 2012, at a compound annual growth rate of more than 20% over the next 5 years. Primarily driven by footprint and thickness reduction of packaged integrated circuits in mobile phones, WLCSP is now used in a wide range of circuits for handsets: EMI/ESD interface protection; unequaled geometry benefits of small footprint and "thinness", WLCSP has become cost competitive with QFN, its main package platform competitor in handsets. This cost benefit now paves the way for the adoption of WLCSP by more consumer end user applications like netbooks, notebooks, gaming consoles, MP3 players and digital still cameras.

Some WLCSP devices can also be found in automotive applications, which may well represent a future growth sector for WLP.

A likely capacity shortage of 300mm WLCSP in the coming months

It appears that during the recent economic downturn, the semiconductor packaging industry as a whole failed to anticipate this demand and did not plan sufficient WLCSP production capacity for the coming months. In particular, a shortage of 300mm wafer capacity for WLCSP is very likely to occur during the next quarters. However, significant investments are being made by a few industry leaders to develop future WLP technologies, like fan-out WLCSP or chip embedding, which will extend the reach of WLP to larger ICs and enable the combination of small size chip‐scale packaging with low profile 3D System-in-Package.

In this report, you will find detailed technical and market status and forecasts on WLP technologies and applications. Market figures and growth rates are provided in units and wafers for each market segment over the 2008-2013 period. Numerous application examples are given, recent technical developments and options are detailed, and industry-wide technology roadmaps are presented.

Details of the new report, table of contents and ordering information can be found on Electronics.ca Publications' web site. View the report: Wafer Level Packaging (WLP) 2009: Technologies, Applications and Markets.