In 2016, Fraunhofer launched the original effort, dubbed the Panel Level Packaging Consortium. The consortium, which had 17 partners, developed various equipment and materials in the arena. Several test layouts were designed for process development on an 18- x 24-inch panel size. That phase of the consortium ended in 2019.
The new effort, called the Panel Level Packaging Consortium (PLC) 2.0, will continue to develop the technologies in the arena, including processes and materials. “Our plan is to start with the PLC 2.0 at the end of this year,” said Tanja Braun, deputy group manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM.
After years of R&D, panel-level fan-out technology is finally beginning to ramp up in the market, at least in limited volumes for a few vendors.
In production for several years, today’s fan-out technologies involve packaging a die in a round wafer format in 200mm or 300mm wafer sizes. In panel-level fan-out, though, the package is processed on a large square panel. By increasing the number of die per substrate, a vendor could see huge productivity gains and lower costs over today’s fan-out processes.
There are various manufacturing challenges here. Plus, there is a lack of panel standards.
