Plenary speech: Microelectronics packaging technologies; Opportunities and challenges for a data driven information and computing industry growth

With the expansive growth of “Big data,” and the pervasive nature of computing, rises a paradigm shift in integrated circuit scaling and microelectronic devices. The pervasive nature of computing drives a need for connecting billions of people and tens of billions of devices/things via cloud computing. Such connectivity effect will generate tremendous amount of data and would require a revolutionary change in the technology infrastructures being used to transmit, store and analyze data. The exponential impact of connectivity represents a data-centric future and drive an accelerated transformation throughout the network fabrics. Additionally, the users' expectations and demand of emerging applications, such as autonomous driving, would not tolerate today's level of latency and computing capacity. All aspects of the computing continuum — silicon, software and computing that are staggered at different levels in the network-would need to be transformed and advanced computing performance would need to be pushed at lower levels of the network delivering an increased speed, capacity and an immediate access. This fundamental shift manifests itself through different device (s) requirements and is defining a third wave of industry drivers with a larger semiconductor footprint. With that comes an increased reliance on microelectronics packaging to deliver far more integrated, complex and advanced systems for different market segments at various levels of the network hierarchy. Heterogeneous integration through package with technologies such as system in package (SIP), on package integration (OPI) and fan-out (WLFO and PLFO) are poised to change the packaging industry and play a disruptive role in enabling next generation devices. The above mentioned move to cloud computing, the transformation of the network and the growth of data analysis are the fundamental growth drivers for the integrated circuit (IC) scaling moving forward. In turn, they represent a tremendous opportunity for microelectronics packaging to deliver, grow and transform into an increasingly influential and enabling role.