Flip Chip Market Trends And Infrastructure Limitations

The importance of high density mounting in the design of highly functional and/or portable products will grow considerably in the future. The use of flip chip on mother boards and inside a package will become critical to achieving these densities. For direct attach to laminate boards, infrastructure development is required to move flip chip into fullscale volume production. First, a number of semiconductor companies offering a sufficient supply of bumped chips is needed before companies without wafer fabs are able to adopt the technology in volume. Secondly, the development of low-cost bumping processes is also required, as are improved underfill materials, test sockets, low-cost high density boards, and equipment to mount flip chip devices. The use of chip size packages (CSP) may be favored over the use of flip chip since the former takes advantage of the existing infrastructure for surface mount technology. The market for flip chip is expected to grow as the technology and the infrastructure to support it expand. The majority of growth will be for flip chip inside packages such as BGAs and CSPs.