Semicon West, Automobile, MEMS, TSV, 3D, Older packaging technology breathes new life into automobile MEMS sensors

At the Semicon West 2011, 3D IC was all the rage –so much so that there were several simultaneous technical sessions on that at the TechXPOT North One, TechXPOT North Two, TechXPOT South and Extreme Electronics that I felt a dire need for concurrent polymorphism to take advantage of those!  And the booths of many equipment vendors were awash with displays of 3D capabilities including specific processes for through-silicon via (TSV) formation, micro bumping & micro-joining technologies and so on.

In sharp contrast and with much less fanfare, the MEMS product companies have been contending with 3D challenges since inception.  For more than a decade, with traditional chip packages as the basis, we have witnessed MEMS technology produce hermetic packaging, multi-die stacking, wafer capping, to mention a few which are on track to become mature technologies.  In yet another sharp contrast and in my opinion quite remarkable, many MEMS products companies are continuing to innovate by adding more functionality to the traditional semiconductor packages.  There is of course the option to integrate more functions at the Silicon-level but adding more features at the package-level is much less time-consuming and the existing OSAT ecosystem can fully support it.

The automobile industry has been an early adopter of MEMS-based sensors.  From seat-belt activation to rollover sensing, a typical automobile on the road today will have few tens of sensors, many of them MEMS-based.  In high end automobiles, this number can be as many as 150 although not all of them are MEMS-based.  The market forecast for MEMS-based products in this sector is expected to cross $2B by 2012 and twice as much by 2015.


Semicon West, Automobile, MEMS, TSV, 3D, Older packaging technology breathes new life into automobile MEMS sensors