WLP 2009: Technologies, applications and markets

NEW YORK, USA: Reportlinker.com announced that a new market research report is available in its catalog: WLP 2009: Technologies, applications and markets.

Market trends
Wafer Level Packaging is a confirmed high growth trend in the semiconductor packaging industry. Wafer Level Chip Scale Packaging (WLCSP), or the direct bonding on printed circuit boards (PCB's) of bumped integrated circuits (ICs) as one of the most visible expressions of WLP, is undoubtedly the fastest growing package type in the whole industry.

Yole forecasts that it will exceed 17 billion units per year by 2012, at a compound annual growth rate of more than 20 percent over the next five 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; power supply (PMIC/PMU, DC/DC converters, LED drivers, MOSFETs); connectivity (Bluetooth, WLAN); and other features (FM, GPS, TV on mobile, camera).

Wafer-Level Packaging of MEMS devices is also expected to grow fast, driven here too by the handset market and its fast increasing rate of integrated sensors (MEMS microphones, accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure and magnetic sensors).

Maturing WLP technologies sustain high market growth
Early reliability issues have been largely improved with time, using new design rules and materials wafer level packaged parts now comfortably pass thermal cycling and drop qualification stress tests for consumer applications with extended die sizes up to 20mm². Concurrently the market matured as more WLP assembly service providers entered the market.

More customers gained confidence in these technologies and tier 2 handset manufacturers also recently started to buy and mount WLCSP solutions on their boards. Besides offering unequaled benefits of small footprint and thickness geometries, 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 WLP- 2009 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.