This month issue An Independent Journal Dedicated to the Advancement of Chip - Scale Electronics November - December 2000 Email the editor

By Mark Bird Contributing Editor

Although the ink has barely dried on the Semiconductor Industry Association’s 1999 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), it’s now time to start on the IPC and National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) roadmap updates for 2000.

The roadmaps can best be explained by their differences:

1. Perspective

• ITRS is from the semiconductor device (wafer) manufacturers
• IPC is from the board makers and assemblers
• NEMI is from the end users

2. Measurements

• IRTS is focused on semiconductor leading-edge device technology
• IPC’s roadmap is from the manufacturers’ and assemblers’ financial center of gravity
• NEMI conveys the requirements to meet the end users’ final product needs

3. Coverage

• IRTS has inputs from the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan
• IPC and NEMI both include inputs from North America only.

Two-year Year Cycles

There is an assembly and packaging technical working group (TWG) in each of the three roadmap activities. Since the roadmaps are on two-year cycles and staggered, an assembly and packaging TWG meets every 4-6 months.

However, the industry is changing so rapidly that roadmaps need to be adjusted every year.

To help drive common focus areas, the 1998 NEMI Roadmap defined the following market application categories (emulators), which are consistent with NEMI’s roadmap product sector definitions:

• Low cost: <$300 consumer products, microcontrollers, disk drives, displays
• Handheld: <$1000 battery-powered products such as mobile products, handheld cellular telecommunications and other hand-heldhandheld products
• Cost-performance: <$3000 notebooks, desktop personal computers and telecommunications equipment
• High-performance: >$3000 high-end workstations, servers, avionics, supercomputers and most "demanding" requirements
• Memory: DRAMs and SRAMs

These emulators are supported across all three roadmaps. The NEMI Roadmap Team will be refining these definitions in this 2000 revision, which will be the drivers for the IPC, and IRTS revisions.

Shrinking Geometries

The continued breakthroughs of shrinking die geometries and lower packaging costs are creating increasingly strong pressures for the packaging community. As the table shows, the pricing pressure in the IRTS Roadmap 1999 showed pricing issues even then for the low-cost emulator.

The requirements in 2000 and beyond to remove Pb, Sb, and Br from the packaging materials is are going to increase material costs by at least 10-15% above the costs shown in the table.

Pricing pressures have intensified since the over-capacity environment of 1996-1998 drove prices down by 30-40 percent. Many of the IC merchant semiconductor manufacturers have abandoned their own packaging operations and have forgotten the real cost of being in the packaging design, assembly and test business.

At these prices, who can afford to develop the new technologies and materials needed for the next generation package families?

The final question is, "How will the industry be able to meet the new pricing challenges without price increases?" This is the challenge that will be a large part of the assembly and packaging Area area of the next roadmaps.

Mr. Bird is an Amkor Technology Fellow and the director of technical marketing at Amkor Technology Inc., Chandler, Ariz. [mbird@amkor.com]