As a pioneer in the semiconductor industry, K&S has been committed to providing customers with market-leading packaging solutions for decades. In recent years, K&S has enhanced its products such as advanced packaging, electronic assembly, and wedge welding machines through strategic acquisitions and independent research and development, while further expanding the product range of consumables in conjunction with its core products.
At the beginning of this meeting, Zhang Zanbin first showed everyone the revenue performance of K&S in the past three years. While the performance continues to grow, it is inevitable to see a trend of slowing down growth. Regarding the market expectations for 2019, Zhang Zanbin said that due to the current situation of the global semiconductor market and the tense situation of international trade relations, the performance in 2019 is expected to be greatly affected, and the market expectations are not optimistic.
In other parts of the meeting, Zhang Zanbin mainly shared with us K&S's progress in Flip Chip (hereinafter referred to as FC) and Mini LED.
Future Trends of Flip Chip
Zhang Zanbin shared K&S’s latest FC packaging equipment, Katalyst. By using electronic vibration cancellation function to compensate for accuracy errors caused by machine vibration, Katalyst provides the industry with the highest accuracy and production speed for flip chips. Its hardware and technology can achieve an accuracy of 3μm, which is the best level in the industry. The production capacity is also as high as 15,000UPH, which is equivalent to double the average production capacity in the industry. The main performance of Katalyst is as follows:
As for the high precision of equipment, Zhang Zanbin believes that due to the continuous improvement of semiconductor integration, the volume and area have been shrinking, so the requirements for precision are getting higher and higher. The precision of 3μm can better meet industry requirements.
Talking about the current status and future prospects of FC packaging, Zhang Zanbin replied that the current mainstream packaging technology is still dominated by wire bonding packaging, and FC packaging only accounts for about 20% of semiconductor packaging. As traditional welding will stabilize, with the development trend of emerging technologies such as 5G and IoT, the proportion of flip-chip packaging in product applications that require ultra-thin design and area saving such as mobile phones, tablets, and computers will increase in the future to meet industry requirements.
It is understood that Katalyst equipment has not yet been mass-produced and will not be mass-produced this year. Mass production may have to wait until 2020. The reason, Zhang Zanbin explained, is that on the one hand, it is due to the deserted semiconductor market environment this year; on the other hand, due to the current cooling of the memory market, the revenue of various storage giants has fallen sharply. Considering that the FC packaging process is suitable for the memory field, it is a good choice to postpone the mass production progress and wait for the opportunity.
As a leading company in the packaging equipment industry, how does K&S respond to the challenges faced by the advent of 5G technology? In this regard, Zhang Zanbin believes that with the arrival of 5G technology, there will be an increase of about 20% of electronic components, and chip integration will be greatly improved. Traditional packaging methods will not be able to meet industry needs. Therefore, for packaging, 3D packaging will become the future development trend. However, the huge cost problem brought by 3D packaging will be a difficulty and challenge that cannot be ignored.
What is the potential of Mini LED?
Every transcendence and implementation of new technologies is of great significance to the development of the industry. Under the impact of the Internet era and the new normal development trend of high-end and large-screen color TVs, K&S is optimistic about the future development potential of Mini LED and Micro LED.
Micro LED and Mini LED are two concepts that have been hotly speculated recently. These two technologies are even better than OLED in some technical aspects, and many companies have deployed related industries.
Among them, regarding the difference between Micro LED and Mini LED, theoretically, the two represent two different things. Micro LED is a new generation of display technology, a miniaturized LED with a matrix, and the LED unit is between 2-50μm. The final product will be thinner.
Mini LED is about 100μm in size and is a transition technology between traditional LED and micro LED. It is an improved version of traditional LED backlight. Since Micro LED has higher thresholds and technical obstacles, Mini LED is technically less difficult and easier to achieve mass production. It can also develop the LCD backlight market in large quantities and has good product economics. Therefore, major manufacturers have recently focused on Mini LED.
In this regard, Zhang Zanbin said that Mini LED is mainly used in large screens, including televisions, large-size monitors, and medium-size automotive displays. Currently, traditional LED backlight TVs use about 50 LEDs. However, with the popularity of Mini LED backlight applications, the number of mini LEDs used in backlights will increase to more than 20,000. Therefore, more efficient means of transfer will be needed.
Mini LED can also be made into panels. Compared with LCD panels, Mini LED panels have a simpler manufacturing structure, higher luminous efficiency, higher resolution, stronger, more transparent and higher flexibility. However, the commercialization of Mini LED applications depends on when the bottleneck of mass transfer technology can be overcome, which is also the key process for manufacturing Mini LED displays.
Regarding the future prospects of Mini LED, Zhang Zanbin predicts that Mini LED will replace LCD in 3-5 years. As for the competition with OLED, it will be a protracted battle.
In addition, at SEMICON China, K&S also exhibited several recently released products: GEN-S series ball welding machine RAPID MEM, Asterion wedge welding machine, high-performance PowerFusion TL wedge welding machine, etc. There is also a SiP system packaging demonstration line, including a K&S iFlex T2 PoP equipment, a printing press and an automated optical inspection equipment to demonstrate the complete solution of PoP packaging to visitors.
Through the above content, we can see that as a leader in the semiconductor packaging equipment industry, K&S combines its rich professional knowledge, strong process technology and R&D strength to help customers meet the challenges of next-generation electronic component packaging.
Anna
Anna