ASIC packaging trends-a five year perspective

Today, ASIC packaging is being driven by the trend towards “super integration” and “system on a chip” with two distinct market segments: (1) high-end, low-to-medium volume products such as workstations and servers that value performance (clock rates and power dissipation) over cost, and (2) high volume, commodity products such as personal computers, printers, and scanners that value cost over performance. As commodity microprocessors and supporting components continue to close the performance gap with proprietary microprocessor architectures, there is mounting pressure on the commodity segment to provide high performance packaging at very low cost. The increasing competition from commodity systems is putting significant pressure on packaging costs for high-end systems