Following several years of co-development efforts and path breaking work to help establish industry standards and facilitate a supply chain infrastructure, Amkor Technology Inc. has emerged as the semiconductor industry's leading supplier of PoP (Package on Package) solutions for cell phones and other handheld multimedia applications. Since its introduction at the end of 2004, Amkor's award winning package stackable very thin fine pitch BGA (PSvfBGA), (the bottom, high density package that enables PoP stacks), has been one of the fastest growing new products in Amkor's history.
According to a recent study by TechSearch International, the semiconductor industry shipped approximately 67 million PoP packages in 2006. TechSearch estimates the market for PoP packages will double in 2007 and nearly double again in 2008, with continued robust growth through 2010. The TechSearch study indicates that Amkor held a 45 percent share of the worldwide market for PoP packages based on 2006 shipments. Amkor believes this percentage was significantly greater than any other PoP producer.
"Driven by the needs of providing greater functionality and better performance in smaller and smaller spaces, the PoP is seeing exceptionally strong growth for mobile phones," said E. Jan Vardaman, President, TechSearch International Inc. "While stacked die packages have many of the advantages, the need to incorporate logic and the issues of a known good die solution make PoP a better choice from the system level. An increasing number of companies tell us they plan to use PoP."
"Demands for increased signal processing and memory capacities, combined with pressure to reduce a handset's size and cost, drove development of the PoP solution," said Lee Smith, Amkor's Senior Director of Business Development. "However, establishing industry standards and infrastructure were critical to enable broad adoption of PoP. Now with an expanding infrastructure in place, PoP has become the designers’ platform of choice for integrating logic plus memory in handheld multimedia applications."
PoP enables surface mount stacking of very thin fine pitch BGA packages that are specifically designed to interconnect logic and memory components through a flexible yet standardized architecture. This approach enables OEMs to achieve higher levels of integration and optimized sourcing, thus providing greater product design flexibility and faster time to market.
Amkor spearheaded development of the PoP solution beginning in 2002 through collaborative efforts with a leading cell phone OEM. These efforts led to collaboration with a leading digital signal processing supplier, culminating with the launch of Amkor's PSvfBGA into production at the end of 2004.
"Following the success of our PSvfBGA platform, we are now leveraging our PoP leadership position by offering comprehensive 3D solutions that include top combination memory packages and higher density bottom packages with flip chip or stacked die structures," said Smith.
"The rapid adoption of Amkor's PoP solution has only been made possible through the collaborative efforts of our customers, technology partners and suppliers," said Oleg Khaykin, Amkor's Executive Vice President and CEO. "As consumer demand for handheld multimedia applications continues to strengthen, Amkor is committed to maintaining our leadership position in PoP technology so that we can capitalize on emerging growth opportunities requiring PoP solutions."
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