Back-End Trends: Exhibitor Outlook

The guidelines typically set out at Semicon West will require detailed scrutiny because of the challenges awaiting us as the industry recovers. To provide a glimpse of the trends you might see and hear on the show floor in San Jose, the editors of Semiconductor International and EP&P solicited commentary from top industry professionals. Note the emphasis on fortifying partnering between OEMs and contract manufacturers and, most important, the expansion of the partnership to include initial product design service, parts/materials distribution and after-sale service.

The economic environment has changed dramatically over the past two years. The focus on the production floor has moved from increasing capacity to improving yield. Manufacturers have recognized the necessity of maintaining a highly flexible production environment, able to quickly switch among a wide range of jobs using current SMT technology, or seamlessly integrating one of the converging advanced placement technologies. With automated manufacturing equipment linked to innovative software, the industry will achieve the efficiencies it needs to remain profitable.

The IC packaging market is facing a number of critical business issues. One is the migration to more sophisticated testing systems. With the complex technology of today's ICs, there is a stronger demand for more multifaceted test platforms. However, as testing equipment increases in functionality, so does the cost of ownership. Many of today's testers now exceed $3M. The cost of this equipment, combined with the fact that in many cases no single company has enough production volume to properly utilize these systems, is leading to another trend: consolidation.

Moving beyond 2002, I predict the continual need for significant capital investments. Because of this, many companies may decide they no longer want to be in this market, a factor that will also contribute to industry consolidation.

There will be an increased need for more turnkey services included with IC packaging, for instance design, backgrinding, wafer probe/test, and drop shipping to the end user. IC packaging companies will work more efficiently with the customer and end users to design effective turnkey solutions that meet current market demands.

I hear it from OEMs everywhere: The cost of poor quality is eating us alive. There are more defects shipped than we like to believe. Higher quality will lead to faster adoption of new technology, which in turn can help drive a comeback. Attention to quality also means higher customer satisfaction and a higher degree of differentiation between competitors. The manufacturer that can master the quality equation has a real competitive advantage.

Quality also leads to greater manufacturing efficiency, translating into a better bottom line. If products are developed and produced with higher-quality processes and methodologies, the cost of manufacturing is lower - scrap cost is lower, dead-on-arrival costs are lower, warranty costs are lower.

Look at a notebook computer that sells for under $2K - its average warranty cost is $250. If you take that level of warranty expense from already-razor-thin margins, your profit's gone. Adopting a more effective, intelligent test strategy can lower that warranty cost and become a major factor toward getting quality right.

The dramatic market downturn of the last 15-18 months, as unfortunate as it may be, is a wake-up call for all of us. I believe that as a consequence we will move into the next upturn being more effective and more efficient - if we have learned our lesson about quality. We have to. The future of our industry depends on getting this quality issue right.

It feels like we just woke up from a wild dream where we were running so fast that we collapse from exhaustion and need to catch our breath. But don't take too long; the race is about to start all over again! To survive the new race, companies must to be in top form. Industry leaders in PCB assembly are scrambling to develop, adopt or obtain capabilities that give them a competitive advantage and keep them in the race. Consistency in most PCB processes has been brought in control through standardization of processes, materials, capital equipment and parts.

The wild card is still functional fault diagnosis - automation of functional fault diagnostics has become a high leverage opportunity. There have been many attempts to automate this process over the years with varying degrees of success. Much of this work has been custom in nature due to a lack of easy-to-implement, commercially available solutions. This has all changed, and Agilent Technologies' Fault Detective has broken both the technological and usability barriers of past products. This technology not only reduces the cost of diagnostics, but more important, it provides the consistency and repeatability that all automated processes provide.

The semiconductor industry is emerging from one of its deepest recessions. At this year's Semicon West, the integrated circuit manufacturers will be assessing capabilities, technology, and capital strength to decide with whom they need to partner for their future growth. We feel that the IC packaging and test business will grow at a much faster rate than the overall rate of the total semiconductor market for the following basic reasons:

1. The IC manufacturers must assess their present and future production needs to determine if it is more cost effective to make the internal investment or to outsource to assembly and test companies. We believe the outsourcing model is the direction that many will take.
2. The location of their internal facilities may be a barrier to the growth of present or future business in regional markets such as Japan, Taiwan and China. IC packaging foundries are located to satisfy government local production requirements and to enable a faster time-to-market for their customers.
3. As technology advances, large expenditures are necessary to maintain cutting-edge packaging capabilities. Therefore, packaging foundries will be required to meet those needs.

We see a continued consolidation of smaller packaging houses and merchant semiconductor packaging facilities to take advantage of economies of scale and vital regional locations. This consolidation will be rapid as the semiconductor market recovers.

Asymtek's semiconductor business is primarily in automatic dispensing liquid encapsulants and underfill epoxies for back-end packaging. During the last 11/2 years, the requirements for new capacity at most electronic manufacturing service (EMS) companies and OEMs have been minimal. Most of the business is related to capability rather than capacity. In other words, the market is similar to other downturns in that companies are still investing in new technology. It seems that the market hit a bottom in November 2001, and is presently growing at ~5-10%.

The market drop has had some benefits for equipment manufacturers. The pause in capacity provides time to increase productivity, make improvements, explore new markets, and develop new products. It gives us a chance to look at the big picture, make changes happen and take market share. One of the industry trends is "lean" manufacturing. This provides opportunities to develop new machine configurations and performance points that fit our customers' production requirements.

Packaging markets have come full circle over the past 40 years. In the 1960s, thick/thin-film hybrid technology addressed the limitations of fledgling ICs. Then, the microcircuit industry introduced the multichip module (MCM) and its variations (MCM-D, -L, -C). No one technology dominated and the multi-billion dollar market projections with 40-50% CAGR's did not materialize.

Printed wiring board (PWB) technology during this time was lacking the features available to ceramic-based technologies, and bare die and wire bonding to laminate structures had yet to be realized. While the silicon industry continued to progress at the speed of Moore's Law, technologies such as system-on-a-chip (SoC) emerged. Although it is possible to integrate a significant amount of functionality on one silicon device, the cost of doing so can be prohibitive. Packaging technology had advanced to the point where intentionally splitting the system into multiple dice provided a performance advantage as well as a cost advantage. One such technique is LTCC-based system-in-a-package (SiP).

The use of low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology provides an unequaled opportunity for high-density packaging of systemic electrical and mechanical structures. SiPs undertake current market potentials in excess of $10B per annum, both technically and cost-effectively.

The IC packaging and PCB assembly industries have grown to a point in their evolution where in-house software for connectivity requires too much engineering time and does not provide the necessary functionality or flexibility needed to connect the equipment to host-level systems. Thus, there are two specific trends in software development that will emerge in the next six to 12 months.

First, equipment users are focused on yield improvement and scrap reduction. To address this issue, both independent parties and major equipment suppliers have focused on the development of robust Web-based equipment to host communication solutions. In the semiconductor industry, the generic equipment model (GEM) interface standard has been widely adopted, but migration into the PCB assembly market has been slow, keeping the price high.

To ease the migration path for the PCB industry, NEMI and IPC developed a new extensible markup language (XML) based interface specification (IPC-254X), which will make it easier to interface and customize equipment data to end-user needs. These new standards will allow equipment suppliers to include an IPC interface on all equipment at a low price. The first version has been released and enhancements to add functionality are being discussed.

A second trend is the development of flexible software architectures for controlling SMT machines, flip-chip placement equipment, and other high-volume equipment. The changing end-user market is causing OEMs to redesign at an accelerated rate, which has produced many different versions of production equipment to be designed and supported. With the latest object-oriented software tools and processes, combined with the use of simulation and advanced calibration techniques, equipment makers can develop variations from a common machine platform without large-scale changes to the software.

The drive to meet consumer demand for small, lightweight electronics has led to the development of packages with new combinations of components and interconnection configurations to provide unbounded functionality. New packaging technologies are driving changes in manufacturing throughout the electronics industry, and as a result, greater manufacturing challenges have emerged at every assembly level. From a technological standpoint, the differences between components, assemblies and substrates are harder to see. Emerging materials and process solutions have made the distinction between where the substrate ends and the component begins difficult to identify in traditional terms.

Business is changing as companies reorganize to take advantage of these emerging technologies, and are even driving technology advances as a result. Major EMS companies are moving into the PCB arena and offering packaging services, expanding their services mainly through acquisitions. SMT-focused capital equipment manufacturers are adapting existing platforms to provide process capabilities for packaging technologies.

The successful companies will be those who are flexible, who quickly accommodate new package and board designs, and who use the capital equipment already on the plant floor to its greatest effectiveness. Flat, focused organizations will be best prepared to deliver the advanced products and services to a wide base of business partners. These companies are strategically better positioned to rapidly advance their core competence technologies, while at the same time responding to the economic challenges faced in an industry characterized by non-stop change.

If history has taught us anything, it is that every painful industry downturn presents an opportunity - the opportunity to reevaluate and strengthen our organizations. Do we have the right team? The right industry focus? The right allocation of resources? The right prioritization of R&D efforts? Questions underscored by the realization that the status quo of the previously good times will not be sufficient to capitalize on the opportunities and challenges presented as the industry's recovery begins to crystallize.

When evaluating capital equipment during a downturn, it is better to invest wisely in high-performance equipment and capabilities - seeking innovative financing techniques, if necessary - rather than to find oneself ill-prepared to face the next challenge. Companies must focus on overall return on investment, and seek equipment that offers not only a reasonable initial cost, but a lengthier useful life, lower support cost, measurable yield enhancement, and maximum uptime. The ease-of-use for training new operators, simplifying workloads of trained operators, and integrating equipment seamlessly into the broader production workflow of the organization will become increasingly critical evaluation criterion.

In today's electronic assembly world we have had to learn to think small as well as fast. This "space" challenge has had a profound impact on the relationship between the circuit assembly and component packaging industries. Notably the MCM is a classic example of the integration of technologies where a multitude of bare die are attached to a FR-4 or ceramic substrate. So is this classified as component fabrication, circuit assembly, both or none of the above?

With the introduction of system-on-a-chip (SoC), stacked die, advanced ASICs, as well as MCM and MEMS, what's left on the PCB? My bet is if the SMT community were more adept at placing flip-chips on board they could capture a majority of the DCA/PCB assembly market. In fact, the CSP was invented by the back-end component fabricators to accommodate the inability of the SMT assembly to deal with thermal expansion.

Given the proprietary nature of CSP technology and the associated revenues, it will be a cold day in the back-end foundry before the fabs will be endorsing FCOB. The bottom line is that component fabricators are most likely interested in capturing more of the $40B+ circuit board business.

All indications are that we're going to see a slower recovery, a general, gradual increase in manufacturing throughout the world. Companies are focused on refining their manufacturing processes. They're looking at the value that materials offer them in their manufacturing processes. Price is not the key issue, but rather the ability of certain materials to provide the maximum amount of value. There is a new focus on the strength and the importance involved in purchasing materials that will provide higher yields and increase the efficiency of their manufacturing processes.

This will naturally affect HDI and advanced packaging issues. For example, we see the ever-growing popularity of processes such as solder bumping replacing sphere placement. It is a more efficient and cost-effective method that also produces higher yields. Solder bumping is a technology that is picking up momentum and we see that process increasing in demand in the next six months to a year.

Compatibility is key with regard to the emerging technologies such as optoelectronics. Materials manufacturers are creating materials that are compatible with new and emerging segments of the industry's manufacturing environment. For example, materials used on optoelectronics boards must be formulated such that they do not interfere with or diminish the flow of photonic energy. Epoxy-based fluxes may be good in that application because residue will not become smeared on the optics and diminish the transmission of light.

Meanwhile, the industry is really starting to embrace lead-free assembly solutions, because now they are proven solutions. We know that the manufacturing process works, just as we know that there is legislation quickly heading our way.

As the semiconductor industry ramps up new processes for advanced devices, there has been a significant shift in IC cost structures. For many of the advanced products, wafer processing no longer makes up the dominant portion of the production cost. Now, packaging costs dominate, in some cases accounting for 80% or more of total production costs.

With such high costs occurring at the end of a production line, ensuring that only known-good dies enter the packaging process is imperative. In the past, critical processes were monitored with parametric testing on small wafer samples. Now, parametric test is becoming a tightly integrated production process that prescreens dies prior to packaging.

Although process monitoring might use a sample size of five devices, pre-packaging screens typically use samples of about 50 devices to improve the statistical validity of test results

IC makers are looking for parametric test systems that can be upgraded or repurposed for use on different product lines, across wafer sizes, and with new materials and process node transitions, and handle larger sample sizes in a timely manner.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Electronics manufacturing will come back from its near-death experience, but with a very different approach. Critically, manufacturers will become more sophisticated in their ability to produce quality with much lower cost.

We can see this new sophistication already taking hold. For example, a major cell phone manufacturer now reports that it produces the same number of phones as it did two years ago, but with one-third fewer production lines. To achieve such a tremendous increase in productivity, manufacturers must first decide if such an undertaking is strategically important. Next, they need to invest in manufacturing efficiency technologies that can improve efficiencies without lowering quality. Increasingly, we hear stories about EMS companies losing huge production contracts because of inadequate quality. These companies lost sight of the goal: greater productivity and better quality.

With automated manufacturing equipment linked to innovative software, our industry will achieve the efficiencies it needs to remain profitable. Manufacturers with the stomach to invest in the required technologies will reap huge benefits and hold a tremendous competitive advantage.

To meet the SIA roadmap goals, back-end IC manufacturers need new techniques for keeping pace with reduced feature size while increasing performance and maintaining production yields. Solutions range from newer advanced single-chip packages, stacked die, SiPs and MEMS to multi-die modules, copper and low-k dielectric materials. Recent data indicate that global substrates revenue has surpassed traditional leadframe revenue, with the BGA package as the clear enabler for this to occur.

These trends are changing the way back-end packaging materials and equipment suppliers interact with integrated device manufacturers and subcontract assemblers. To help IC manufacturers stay ahead of the roadmaps, suppliers need to expand their capabilities from assembly to interconnect.

Due to cost advantages and a vast established infrastructure, the industry will need wire bonding to continue as the dominant interconnect technology for many years to come. As ball and wedge bond pad pitch mass production thresholds decrease to 35 µm and below, manufacturers will increasingly rely on suppliers to develop processes that continue meeting yield targets.

In response to these trends, the preferred A&P equipment suppliers will be A&P technology developers, able to provide a broad range of package types that integrate equipment, materials, probing and test technologies to keep IDMs and subcontractors ahead of the industry roadmaps, not to mention the competition.

Materials suppliers to the electronics manufacturing industry must develop cutting-edge adhesive and solder technology and work closely with their customers to provide the highest-quality technology available. Three primary market drivers exist. First, manufacturers are converting from wire-bonded packages to flip-chip, to stacked multi-technology, and >1000 I/O packages for both fine-pitch and large-footprint applications. Thus, materials suppliers have formulated materials that will flow uniformly through ever-decreasing gaps and spaces.

Second, to minimize co-planarity issues related to larger foot print die, thinner substrates/die, and large area array packages prone to warpage, materials suppliers have developed lower modulus systems that will reduce warpage and stress.

The third driver is the lead-free initiative, anticipating regulatory legislation in Europe and Japan. Suppliers are working to improve fracture toughness and thermal resistance to 260°C reflow temperatures for qualified lead-free materials.

Materials suppliers that want to prosper and flourish over the long term are faced with the greatest challenge of the electronics industry: finding ways to consistently stay in front of the enormous change that is the very nature of the industry.

As the industry emerges post-downturn, it will not look the same as it did during the heyday years of 1996-2000. What we've just been through was not a temporary glitch; rather, it was and is a disruptive change being driven in part by the outsourcing trend of OEMs operating in an increasingly competitive environment.

Simply put, this shift from OEMs to CEMs affects every aspect of electronics manufacturing. The business values of OEMs and CEMs differ, as does the criteria by which equipment is judged. CEMs work at lower margins: equipment must be functional, flexible and, of course, meet quality levels - but foremost it is required to be economical and focused on a specific set of tasks. Clearly, the vendors who prosper will be those who can deliver higher functionality and productivity at a lower cost of ownership.

The outsourcing trend has expanded to include service. Therefore, subcontract service facilities are a new type of customer requiring a different level of service and an expanded set of tools. Because service technicians are often detached from manufacturing, their skill sets may be different to those who once worked in OEMs or CEMs. The way we sell and support our products will unquestionably evolve to meet this new customer base.

The new look of the industry will be leaner, no doubt. Because we'll all be doing more with less, I expect profitability will rise as we structure ourselves to meet the changing demands of the market. New customers will emerge and market segmentation will encourage new product development to meet their specific needs.

Most industry leaders and economists believe the industry has reached the bottom of the current cycle, but are uncertain whether or not recovery has started and how robust it may be. The next 12 months will be critical to rebuild - or not - confidence in the industry. A lackluster recovery may discourage investment in the industry and retard longer-term growth. Industry leaders need to be prepared to respond to improving prospects with production increases and capacity expansions.

Despite the downturn, there appears to have been no pause in industry efforts to design and manufacture faster, smaller and lower-cost electronic equipment. These should continue to drive innovation in package, component and board designs, in materials, and in manufacturing and assembly processes.

An immediate issue for our industry is the removal of lead from electronic components and assemblies. This usually entails conversion from common tin/lead solders to non-lead solders that are processed at higher temperatures. While this transition has been anticipated for a few years, most implementation is just now beginning. Over the next 12 months, many manufacturers will be implementing new processes and materials compatible with non-lead solders.

Hopefully, a generation of new products - faster, smaller, lower cost, and environmentally more responsible - can help to stimulate demand and strengthen the recovery.

Traditional high-volume production methodologies and attitudes are not servicing some of today's needs for the OEMs. In years past, good production pricing with the EMS companies was enough to carry the low-volume development work for OEMs. The times have changed.

For the large EMS, their production system is not equipped to handle the variables of low-volume new product introduction (NPI) work. New EMS companies that specialize in NPI help the OEMs with the iterating design processes. Inputs to design engineering regarding design for manufacturing has shifted from the OEMs to the EMS. The staff that is actually building product is no longer at the OEMs. The more dedicated NPI shops can attract the higher margins because of the deeper experience in the more difficult engineering builds.

We must now improve efficiencies by offering outsourcing across several companies. A virtual company consisting of an assembly shop partnering with a good design house and a good fabrication shop is a versatile and effective partner of the OEMs. For each new product developed by the OEM, they pay only for the resources they need.

The biggest trend over the next 12 months will be the use of 0201 chip packages. While assemblers and the assembly equipment builders have the technology ready, there still are not many companies designing products using 0201s. The chip shooter industry has developed systems to handle this size package. They have developed smaller nozzle sizes and increasingly more accurate placement methods. Rapid deployment of the 0201 presents a challenge to control the accurate position of these tiny components. Reflow oven manufacturers have needed to further refine the temperature control designs to allow the proper preheat and then reflow of 0201s. This is required to prevent tombstoning of the component. The AOI industry has advanced their systems with the necessary levels of high magnification to inspect these tiny chips. In the next 12 months, I think we will see 0201 chip components actually being placed in a real production environment. I correlate this to the same trend that was experienced in the semiconductor industry with the requirements for the production of the 300 mm wafer. The OEMs designed equipment for the process but the actual utilization of the process was slow to come.

The current recession in photonic components has set in motion a new era in the infrastructure of the industry. The growth of the Internet generated the unprecedented demand for bandwidth, which drove the industry with the mandate: rapid time to volume. Now with inventory oversupply, the new mandate has shifted to cost reduction. Advances in equipment technology have enabled predominantly manual processes to be automated to drive down cost-per-function. But equipment capability is only part of the story. The production of highly integrated components with greater functionality has begun to spawn fundamental change in the supply chain. They are working to shift the burden of developing processes from themselves to their suppliers. Component manufacturers will gain most of their competitive advantage in how quickly they can get innovative new product designs to market, rather than from proprietary manufacturing processes. The nature of the relationships between the parties will therefore shift from "customer/supplier" to technology partnerships. To fulfill their new role, suppliers must have complete knowledge of the entire suite of manufacturing processes that their customers use. The capital equipment business will undergo increased consolidation as equipment companies join forces to improve their own economies of scale and broaden their equipment solutions. In the end, the component producers will be doing business with far fewer but much more capable suppliers.

The semiconductor capital equipment industry is about to enter a new growth cycle. Subcontract manufacturers will play a major role in this cycle. Because they are in a fiercely competitive market, they, in turn, place stringent demands on their equipment suppliers. They know that buying inflexible equipment that cannot adapt to ever-changing needs, or buying the lowest-priced equipment that will result in lost customers due to poor-quality products will be a fatal mistake.

Today, a facility may have a given number of lines with sufficient volumes to dedicate to a particular package type. That is certain to change. Buying equipment with limited flexibility will create the need for additional equipment in a year or two and dramatically increase depreciation expense.

In the end, customer satisfaction must take precedence. Equipment that results in poor quality, or even the wrong products going out to the end user, will ultimately result in the loss of that customer.

The 2001 downturn will continue to shape the industry over the coming year. As semiconductor companies continue to look at reducing their operating costs and maximizing efficiencies, outsourcing will be a viable business decision that more companies will choose.

Going forward, it will be critical for back-end service providers to offer customers a "total solution." This means that you must be able to assemble, test and drop-ship to anywhere in the world for your customers. Customers demand it as time-to-market is a competitive differentiator and you can reduce cycle-time by having both assembly and test done at one location. As more functionality is incorporated onto a single chip, fabless companies and IDMs will rely heavily on their IC subcontractors to drive advanced packaging and mixed-signal test capabilities.

From a geographic standpoint, it will be critical for back-end service providers to have assembly and test operations in strategic locations. Over the next year China will fuel a tremendous amount of growth in the semiconductor industry - projected to grow at CAGR of more than 35% for the next three years. As IDMs increase their manufacturing presence in China, IC subcontractors will need to be positioned strategically to support their business requirements.

Packaging has moved from simple housing concepts to a technology that has to satisfy the ever-increasing needs for higher electrical performance, further miniaturization, highest reliability, and thermal and power management at steadily decreasing cost in microelectronic systems. Wafer-level packaging (WLP) has been proven in numerous applications to be the most promising solution. This technology will further benefit from the development of more complex IC architectures and the transition to 300 mm wafers. The move to 300 mm wafers is an important catalyst for wafer bumping and the growth of wafer-level chip-scale packages.

During the economic downturn, technologies that provide for diverse applications and have a broad application base, like MEMS, are attractive. MEMS offer attractive market segments where base technologies such as micromachining are dispersed broadly throughout the industry.

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) is a material that has value in both MEMS and IC fabrication. Demand for SOI structures for next-generation CMOS devices is increasing dramatically. The continuing growth of portable systems and the fast-growing demand for higher performance makes SOI the technology of choice for volume IC production. ICs based on SOI structures can operate at 1 V and below while offering higher performance than conventional CMOS-based chips, making them the ideal components for applications in low-voltage, low-power and high-speed systems.

The electronics manufacturing industry has enjoyed 10 years of growth, with two of those years being exceptionally rewarding. Now we find ourselves in the midst of, and we believe the end of, possibly the worst manufacturing recession in our history, certainly in our sector.

Given a choice, anyone would prefer prosperous economic times. That doesn't mean we can't make the best of a difficult situation. This is a time to slow down and position ourselves for the eventual upturn in business. Companies that use this slow time wisely will be stronger than ever when economic success returns to the electronics industry.

The trend toward miniaturization of electronic devices is demanding cost-effective and smaller packaging solutions that carry enhanced electrical performance and reliability. To address the need for packaging multiple die, Tessera Technologies has developed a package technology that adapts one or two metal layers on a flexible polyimide film base substrate material.

The flex film base substrate allows a multiple die assembly to be folded into a very compact package outline or as pre-tested single die packages that can be stacked sequentially above one another.

A five-die package furnishes a single ASIC and four memory functions in a single low-profile fine-pitch array package outline. The assembly is processed by two separate operations. First, the memory die are assembled (face-down) onto one flexible substrate and electrically tested through a contact matrix on the outer surface. The memory package is then folded in half onto itself and secured with a bonding compound. In a separate operation, the ASIC is assembled to its own flexible substrate.

As portable consumer electronic products continue to get smaller, IC packaging must answer the demand for real estate and increased performance. One of the fastest growing product segments being designed in portable applications is Little Logic, consisting of single-, dual- and triple-gate logic functions that replace the need for the traditional quad-gate functions. The 5-pin single-gate devices are available from most logic providers in the industry-standard SC-70, but the need for smaller IC packaging has been answered by TI's release of Little Logic wafer chip-scale package devices. These devices have no ceramic or plastic molding encapsulating the integrated chip. The IC is its own package with the addition of solder bumps in place of the traditional device pins. The 5-pin wafer chip-scale package is 70% smaller than the industry-standard SC-70 devices to satisfy the highly sought-after board real estate.

Portable applications will continue to decrease in size and require advanced performance. At the same time, the manufacturers will require improved IC packaging technologies. With these demands in place, we will see increased market interest in wafer chip-scale packaging over the next six months to one year.

Electronic manufacturers have recognized the necessity of maintaining a highly flexible production environment, able to quickly switch between a wide range of jobs using current SMT technology, or seamlessly integrating one of the converging advanced placement technologies. A definitive merging of SMT and advance placement technology is underway, with the depletion of inventories finally allowing suppliers to consider converting existing technologies to those incorporating processes once considered unique to the die bonding arena. A continuing effort toward miniaturization is placing an increasing demand on the efficient processing of 0402 and 0201 components.

The interest in advanced placement equipment is at a heightened level, with customers placing an increasing emphasis on flexibility, and "total solution-based" equipment selection. The need for an advanced packaging technology (APT) assembly tool to handle a diverse mix of both high-accuracy die placement applications, as well as the complementary SMT applications, is driving the need for consolidation of these requirements into one platform. Escalating interest is expected to center on the highly flexible work module, able to handle SMT, bare die, flip chip, and opto devices. Also, newer technologies such as ultrathin die are being seen increasingly, continually increasing the range of capabilities needed for the equipment being quoted.