Understanding the big spend on advanced packaging facilities

An article written by Anton Shilov for EE TIMES, in collaboration with Yole Intelligence, part of Yole Group.

Leading chipmakers in recent years spent tens of billions of dollars on advanced-chip-packaging facilities—to prepare for building processors in multi-chiplet packages that will offer consistent performance increases and ensure continuity of Moore’s law.

Analysts interviewed by EE Times took pains to explain the spend. But before we go there, let’s first take a close look at the numbers.

Advanced-chip-packaging revenue is expected to grow from $44.3 billion last year to $78.6 billion by 2028, according to Yole Intelligence. Meanwhile, the traditional chip packaging market was valued at around $47.5 billion last year and is projected to grow to $57.5 billion by 2028. The whole chip packaging market is expected to reach $136 billion by 2028, Yole Intelligence estimates.*Given rapidly expanding demand for advanced packaging, it is not surprising that that leading chipmakers and “outsourced semiconductor assembly and test,” or OSAT, companies spent around $14.5 billion on advanced packaging fabs and tools in 2022, Yole Intelligence estimated. Intel was projected to lead the market with around $4 billion investment, followed by TSMC with about $3.6 billion, Samsung Foundry with circa $2 billion, and ASE Group with roughly $1.7 billion. Due to a chip market downturn this year, the companies are expected to reduce their advanced packaging CapEx budgets to $11.9 billion, which is still a massive sum.

There are many reasons why advanced packaging market and multi-chiplet designs are set to thrive in the coming years…

Read the full article here.