Renesas Subsidiary Creates High-Temp QFN-Like Package

A Renesas Technology subsidiary has developed a thermal dissipation package that supports a wider operating temperature range than conventional QFN packages. The Pro.Quad package has small portions (<1>

Kenji Tsuda, Asia Contributing Editor -- Semiconductor International, 2/17/2009 7:27:00 AM

Renesas Northern Japan Semiconductor Inc. has developed a new thermal dissipation package that is size-compatible with QFN (quad flat non-leaded) packages. The Pro.Quad package features a rear-side metal in the bottom center, and a small protrusion of lead in the four sides and corners. The package attaches to a PCB more closely, leading to effective heat dissipation. The name of the new package comes from the protrusion in the four corners.

Renesas Northern Japan, a subsidiary of Renesas Technology Corp. (Tokyo), created the package with a form that is similar to QFN packages. However, the Pro.Quad package has small portions (<1>

The Pro.Quad is a QFN-like package that can withstand higher temperatures. (Source: Renesas)

Renesas provides three types of Pro.Quad packages: 6 mm square with 36 leads, 8 mm square with 52 leads, and 9 mm square with 60 leads. The lead pitch of 0.5 mm complies with the JEDEC standard, along with a mounted thickness of <1>In general, a heat dissipation metal with plastic resin in the same plane could peel away the resin or generate a gap between the resin and the metal because of a large thermal expansion coefficient difference between the metal and resin. Renesas has studied a wide variety of combinations of base resin, silica filler, mold release agent and other materials, along with the metal design. The metal sheet in the rear surface is part of the leadframe, and is the same material as the leads.

In conventional mold packages, four corners in a package can tend to concentrate stress with temperature cycles, leading to detachment of the package from the board. The new package has four corner metals that easily adhere to the board, leading to higher endurance during the temperature cycles. In a temperature cycle test of -40 to +125°C, the new package achieved >4000 cycles with no failures. Automotive electronics require up to 1500 cycles, and the company targeted double that number: 3000 cycles. In another temperature cycle test of -40 to +85°C, the new package passed 5500 cycles.

The new package also features visible solder joints, while joints in conventional QFN packages are usually invisible. That makes it possible to check the solder fillets in the Pro.Quad package after reflow soldering, Akaki said.

ASE Leads Gartner Packaging Market Share Ranking

The economic downturn may lead to consolidation in the packaging industry, according to Gartner Inc. analyst Jim Walker. Advanced Semiconductor Engineering managed to pull in more revenue in 2008 than any of its advanced packaging competition -- topping $3.0B.

Sally Cole Johnson, Contributing Editor -- Semiconductor International, 2/25/2009 9:17:00 AM

The economic downturn and the rise in gold prices are putting a double whammy on the packaging industry, according to Gartner Inc. (Stamford, Conn.).

The Top 10 advanced packaging companies garnering market share on Gartner’s just-released preliminary list for 2008 include Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE, Kaohsiung, Taiwan), Amkor Technology (Chandler, Ariz.), Siliconware Precision Industries Co. (SPIL, Taichung, Taiwan), STATS ChipPAC (Singapore), Powertech Technology (Taipei, Taiwan), UTAC (Singapore), ChipMOS Technologies (Hsinchu, Taiwan), King Yuan Electronics (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Carsem (Ipoh, Malaysia) and Unisem (Ipoh, Malaysia).

Two packaging companies can boast revenue >$2B: ASE and Amkor. They’re followed by SPIL and STATS ChipPAC in the >$1B category, and the remaining six companies’ revenues range from ~$250M to $900M. The Top 10 companies’ combined revenue totaled $12.5B in 2008.

That said, the 2008 revenue numbers aren’t pretty, as Jim Walker, Gartner’s research vice president, semiconductor manufacturing, bluntly put it. “And the packaging market will be down much more in 2009,” he added. “In fact, Q4 last year was abysmal — with everyone down 25-30%. Q1 this year doesn’t look much better, and is likely to decrease another 10% or more. Hopefully, this quarter we’ll see the bottom for both the packaging industry and the semiconductor industry. By March, we might see a little bit of growth, but it’s gone down so much during the past four months, it will take a while to recover. Month by month we’ll start to see a growth of maybe 5-8%, then it’ll start pulling up. But we don’t expect that to happen until the second half — if we’re lucky.”

Preliminary market share of the Top 10 SATS companies, based on recent currency exchange rates. (Source: Gartner)

Another big part of the trouble is that capital expenditures on equipment have dried up. “Companies that were spending $300M to $400M on equipment in 2008 aren’t spending even $100M this year,” Walker noted. “Capital expenditures are down 45-50% or more for the semiconductor capital equipment market — whether it’s front-end or back-end.”

Gold pricing hurts

Rising gold prices are also affecting the profitability of packaging companies that do gold bumping or gold wire bonding, because >10% of the raw material costs and revenue are attributed to gold. “Companies are beginning to move to copper, but the majority still use gold,” Walker pointed out. “Packaging companies are closely related not only to unit production, but also raw materials, especially gold.”

Regarding technologies to watch, Walker said the top companies appear to all be focusing in varying degrees on wafer-level packaging (WLP) and through-silicon vias (TSVs) and driving down costs. In the next six to 12 months, he expects to see several new packaging solutions (as opposed to wafer solutions), because packaging is able to respond more quickly to changing market conditions. “Packaging is often an easier route to solve a customer’s problem without a huge R&D cost and the associated long product development cycles. It takes too long and costs more than $30M to develop some of the new ICs, and that’s a lot of money when you can take two die and put them side-by-side or stack them and get to market within two to three months — as opposed to six months to a year for wafer solutions,” Walker said. “Packaging solutions are helping get new products out there faster.”

Unfortunately, the current economic situation is affecting the packaging industry much like the rest of the semiconductor industry — with reports of layoffs, salary reductions and shutdowns for a week to a month becoming increasingly common. Consolidation is also expected. “With all of the economic turmoil, we’ll likely see lots of industry consolidation because there are more than 130 packaging companies in the market,” Walker noted. “Many companies will not be able to survive the next few years. And it’s not just packaging companies. The memory area is being hit extremely hard. When demand shrinks more than 30%, it becomes a real challenge to stay in business. The good news is that people seem to be still demanding more functionality in their handheld devices — Apple iPhone sales actually continue to hold up.”