PRESENTATION

From Miniaturization to System Integration: The Growing Role of Semiconductor Packaging

In recent decades, semiconductors have become increasingly vital to everyday life, evolving from enabling analog applications (such as early computers and mobile phones) to powering today’s on demand world of data centers, smartphones, and tablets. As we enter a new era, their influence will expand even further into the robotics domain—driven by AI from cloud to edge and by smart, connected devices. For these technologies, miniaturization—traditionally governed by front end processes and advanced wafer nodes—will be essential. In recent years, electronic packaging has gained significant importance, not only for achieving further miniaturization but also for ensuring cost efficiency. In fact, packaging is poised to enable and accelerate this emerging robotics era through heterogeneous integration, making it a cornerstone for future innovation. With heterogeneous integration, packaging and front end technology must be closely aligned to deliver true system level solutions. To operate effectively at the edge, such systems must be capable of sensing, thinking, connecting, and acting. Ensuring the proper functionality of these systems requires a deep understanding of their behavior—both throughout manufacturing and over their full operational lifetime. Achieving this demands careful material selection based on material characteristics, supported by detailed thermo mechanical and thermal modeling to guarantee optimal performance. This presentation will illustrate these concepts using examples from the field.