Driven by application diversification, IPDs continue their promising growth, announces Yole Développement (Yole). Miniaturization and integration are key drivers in electronic devices. This is even more critical in several consumer applications, where thinner devices mean higher integration levels, necessitating low-profile components.
The thin-film IPD process offers finer pitch feature, better tolerance control, higher flexibility, and packages possessing higher integration than other commonly available technologies. These aspects explain IPD’s expansion over the last years, and its promising continued growth.
Today, electrostatic discharge (ESD) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) protection are IPD’s primary applications, but RF front-end modules requiring IPD baluns, diplexers, matching, etc. are fast-increasing too. Currently, consumer applications (especially smartphones) are the big consumers of IPDs in RF front-end modules, or for ESD/EMI protection. Miniaturization, low cost, and high-value precision are the added-values IPDs bring to these applications. Planar structure capacitors, inductors, and resistors are built using thin-film deposition technologies with high-performance results. A wide variety of dielectric and resistive materials are proposed by a large number of companies, depending on the desired performance of the IPD.
3D structure technologies have also been available for a couple of years now, especially for achieving excellent capacitance density values in silicon-trench capacitors. This new technology has opened new business opportunities for IPDs in other applicative markets, as was demonstrated with the iPhone 7 and its A10 processor, which integrates several silicon-trench capacitors under the microprocessor’s bumps.
In the digital & mixed signal market, integration density and miniaturization are the priorities – therefore conventional planar technologies can’t be used since the capacitance densities are currently far from what’s required.
Yole releases a dedicated report focused on the IPD market in the field of semiconductor applications: Thin-Film Integrated Passive Devices. Aim of this analysis is to provide a deep understanding of the applications, the technology trends and market forecasts by market segment. Under this new technology and market survey, Yole’s analysts provide detailed information regarding IPD devices applicability, major today’s applications and applications potentially requiring different types of IPD substrates. IPD devices roadmap per application, status of the IPD adoption, technological trends, competitive landscape and more are part of this IPD report…
