Breaking Limits
Samsung Electronics established an Advanced Package (AVP) organization in charge of packaging technology and product development in December of last year. The Korean semiconductor giant announced its goal to go beyond the limits of semiconductors with advanced packaging technology.
“We at the AVP Business Team will create products that do not exist in the world now,” said Vice President Kang Moon-soo, head of the AVP Business Team at Samsung Electronics, in a contribution on March 23.
State-of-the-art package technology enables more transistors to be integrated into smaller semiconductor packages through heterogeneous integration technology that connects multiple semiconductors horizontally and vertically. This provides powerful performance that surpasses the performance of each.
“Samsung Electronics is the only company in the world that is engaging in the memory, logic foundry, and package businesses,” Kang said. “By taking advantage of these strengths, we will provide competitive package products that connect high-performance memory semiconductors such as state-of-the-art logic semiconductors and high bandwidth memory (HBMs) manufactured through an EUV process through heterogeneous integration technology.”
“We will communicate directly with customers and commercialize advanced package technologies and solutions customized for their needs and products,” Kang added. “We will focus on the development of next-generation 2.5-dimensional and 3-dimensional advanced package solutions based on redistribution layer (RDL), silicon interposer/bridge and through-silicon-via (TSV) stacking technology.”
The advanced packaging market is expected to enjoy a high annual growth rate of 9.6 percent from 2021 to 2027. In particular, the market of 2.5-dimensional and 3-dimensional packages using heterogeneous integration technology is expected to grow by more than 14 percent annually and faster than the entire high-tech package market.
Packages used to simply electrically connect a chip to the outside and protect it in the past. But these days, packages are expanding their roles to complementing parts that are difficult to implement with a chip.
In particular, semiconductor makers are developing a new convergence package technology to overcome existing technological limitations. Starting with the release of HBM2 high-bandwidth memory in 2015, Samsung Electronics has achieved innovation in packaging stacking technology such as I-Cube (2.5D) in 2018 and X-Cube (3D) in 2020.
Samsung Electronics is planning to mass-produce X-Cube (u-Bump) that can process more data than a normal bump in 2024 and introduce bump-less type X-Cube that can process more data than X-Cube (u-Bump) in 2026.