Unveiling the Next Generation in Substrate Technology

The electronic packaging industry has been crippled by the incremental technology advancement produced by the substrate manufacturers over the past decade. While semiconductors and related packaging progress at alarming rates, typically doubling in functionality every couple of years, the substrate portion of the integrated circuit (I.C.) packaging industry continues to fall further and further behind. This has created a significant technology gap, forcing the semiconductor manufacturers to compensate their chip designs for by adding more redistribution layers or adding additional size to the chip itself.

Thus, the electronics packaging industry is in dire need of a significant change at the substrate level to remove the innovative barrier that exists today between the substrate manufacturers and chip packaging companies to allow the chip manufacturers to continue their path towards reduction in size and cost, all the while increasing the functionality.

A collaborative effort between Amkor Technology, Unimicron, Anvik and Atotech, on a package technology with intellectual property owned by Amkor, has led to a significant new breakthrough in substrate manufacturing techniques allowing both layer reduction (thus cost reduction) and format reduction vs. current state of the art technologies available today.

The tremendous growth and need in the flip chip packaged technology sector has helped to facilitate the implementation of this disruptive technology by driving a need for miniaturization in both design rules and format. This innovative technology utilizes laser ablation techniques to form electrical paths for signal propagation within the dielectric, as opposed to conventional technologies that form signal propagation above the dielectric materials.

A close look at this technology reveals the numerous benefits and opportunity for significant gap closure to current needs in the chip packaging industry today. The laser structured approach offers a unique opportunity to simultaneously improve upon traditionally incremental improvements in design as well as optimize electrical performance by reducing signal paths and proximating grounds for shielding purposes. The laser structured approach addresses critical needs for the coming generations of chip packaged substrates by not only driving miniaturization, but also by improving electrical performance. This paper unveils the technology and manufacturing processes to enable this higher density interconnect technology in the IC packaging world.