System-in-Package Technology Challenges Moore's Law
According to a report on System-In-Package (SiP) Technology by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., (GIA), the global market for System-In-Package (SiP) is projected to reach 23.2 billion units in volume sales by 2018.
This will be primarily driven by growing demand for compact and high-performance electronic devices and the resulting need for advanced IC packaging technology. Expanding end-use applications of SiP Technology and growing demand from small and medium sized electronic manufacturers also bode well for the market.
As one of the most important and critical technologies of the 21st century capable of sustaining the progress being made in miniaturisation, driving performance and ensuring cost reduction in the field of portable electronics, System-in-Package (SiP) technology flaunts a robust outlook for the future.
SiP technology, which enables the integration of multiple chips with different functionality into a single package, provides unrivalled benefits, such as superior integration flexibility, reduced R&D costs, faster time to market as a result of accelerated product development, and lower product costs. With numerous benefits stacked in its favour, SiP technology is gaining increased visibility in a range of applications with the most prominent being in mobile phone applications.
Following the era of personal desktop PCs, and workstations which demanded single chip technologies, the semiconductor industry is today driven by wireless communication technologies and equipment, which demand lighter and smaller chip packaging.
Against this backdrop, the chip/package co-design approach is quickly replacing the traditional chip plus package assembly production flow strategy. With the ongoing wireless revolution continuously churning out new wireless devices in large numbers, SiP technology stands optimally angled to benefit. The increasing demands on lower power consumption, higher performance and bandwidth, smaller sizes and lighter weight, will bring out SiP as the preferred approach in semiconductor design.
The increasing need for compactness and high-speed performance in electronic products will especially drive growth in the SiP technology market over the next few years. SiP, as a technology, is increasingly being deployed in numerous devices.
Various advanced components are also being added to SiP to drastically improve the performance. These include MPEG decoders, PCI bus interfaces, double-data-rate memory controllers and specialised filter blocks. Innovations in subcomponents of SiP, which are driving further reduction in the component sizes are poised to significantly enhance the functionality of SiP embedded products, while at the same time reduce development costs, thus helping open up new application avenues for SiP.
SiP technology is witnessing a gradual expansion in applications ranging from traditional battery operated systems such as in digital video cameras (DVC), mobile phones, and mobile computing devices to non-battery systems like digital video recorders (DVR), and digital TV (DTV), thus finding increased volume gains. Also, with the Moore's law hitting an impasse, "More than Moore" is the strategy being adopted in the chip industry.
With the "More Than Moore's Law" focussing on system integration unlike the transistor density of the Moore's Law, SiP is poised to play a critical role in the development of mega-function electronics of the future. As packages go vertical, the ability to package million and billions of transistors on top of each other with vertical connections offers a potentially viable solution to further the continuance of Moore's law.
As a result, the SiP approach is finding increased adoption among foundries, fabless and packaging/stacking houses, amongst others. The SiP technology goes beyond the Moore's law and adopts a radically new approach to system level chip design and integration. The technology aims at shrinking bulky PCBs and its components thus allowing component density to double every year unlike the Moore's law wherein the number of transistors on an IC doubles every 18 months.
Increased adoption of SiP is forecast to stem from small and medium sized electronic manufacturers, given the relative cost efficiency, ease of mixing device technologies, elimination of intellectual property issues and greater access to cutting edge technology which otherwise would have been impossible to tap. All of these factors provide SMBs the ability to develop and market advanced, miniaturised products in a short span of time (with lesser time to market abilities) critical to leverage the short window of market opportunity that characterises most markets for portable electronics. The market for portable electronics has fractured, over the years, as a result of increased competition, high voltage innovations and influx of newer market entrants, which in turned has reduced the window of opportunity.
The time available for new products to gain traction in the marketplace is now much shorter, making time-to-market capabilities of critical importance, especially for SMBs. The ability of the SiP technology to address system design challenges, reduce product form factors, and reduce production and technology risks by increasing the success of system level manufacturability, especially appeals to the SMBs.
The Asia-Pacific region represents the fastest growing SiP regional market with unit sales from the region waxing at a CAGR of about 11.7% over the analysis period.
Growth in the market is especially driven by robust demand for electronic products, and strong electronic manufacturing sectors, particularly in countries, such as, China, India, Taiwan, and Singapore. By end-use, Consumer Electronics represents the fastest growing end-use market with volume sales in the market waxing at a CAGR of about 10.9% over the analysis period.
Major players in the global marketplace include Amkor Technology, Atmel Corporation, ChipSiP Technology Co., Ltd., CyberTAN Technology Inc., Fujitsu Limited, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Insight SiP, Orient Semiconductor Electronics Ltd., OriginGPS Ltd., Qualcomm Atheros, Inc., Renesas Electronics Corporation, Sequans Communications, Sequans Communications, Si2 Microsystems Ltd., SiPCUBE, Texas Instruments, and Wi2Wi, Inc.
