This week, Yuya Suzuki, IC Packaging Marketing Manager from Taiyo America, discuss some of the new products he is promoting to OEMs in Silicon Valley.

Dan Beaulieu: Can you discuss new technology trends for PCBs?

Yuya Suzuki: PCB boards are evolving in higher density. For the main board PCB world, mSAP (modified semi-additive process) are widely adopted to achieve smaller Cu wire patterning as small as 20um line and space, especially for mobile applications. For IC substrate world, SAP (semi-additive process) has been adopted for long time, and the smallest Cu wiring width today are as small as 10um and below. For such high density PCB and substrates, high reliability with excellent resistance to Cu migration is one of the important performance of the dielectrics, including solder resist materials. New generation of solder resist materials from Taiyo are designed to have high reliability to support the evolution of PCB and substrate.

Dan: Where do you see the technology going right now?

Yuya: In the high-end IC substrate applications, heterogeneous integration and chiplet are very hot topics today. Higher manufacturing cost of silicon chips by the latest process node below 10nm drives the strong need in disaggregating one large chip into several pieces (chiplet), and re-aggregating later by advanced packaging technologies (heterogeneous integration). In the chiplet and heterogeneous integration, various packaging technologies are invented and developed, including high density IC substrates, fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP), and silicon/glass/organic interposers. These new packaging trend requires new materials that enables the implementation. Taiyo team has been developing variety of materials with superior performances, such as high reliability, low dielectric loss, high thermal or magnetic performance etc.

Dan: How are things in Silicon Valley and your customers?

Yuya: Things are coming back to after COVID, and people start working as previous way. Teleconference are adopted more than before COVID, but face-to-face meeting are also back. Tele-work is more common than before.

Dan: Are they still working on cutting edge technology?

Yuya: Yes, Silicon valley still has a lot of large companies as well as start-ups. New materials, process, and manufacturing technologies are still coming out from this place, due to such high competition.

Dan: Are there any new Taiyo products that you can talk about

Yuya: As mentioned above, high-density of PCB and substrates are big trend, and dry-film solder resist materials are very critical to achieving it for higher planarity and for precise opening control. PSR-800 AUS SR1-Z is a new industry standard dry-film solder resist material for IC substrate applications. A new resin technology adopted for AUS SR1-Z has high resistance to Cu migration and making the material highly suitable for high-density IC substrates. Another important new material is Flexfiner series, which is a dry-film solder resist materials for flexible PCBs. Photo-patternable nature of the Flexfiner enables reduction of form factor of the flexible PCBs since you can assemble components closer to the bending area and can minimize keep-out. Taiyo has more new materials, including photo and non-photo dielectric materials for inner layers, so please feel free to contact Taiyo team if you have any questions.

Dan: Thank you Yuya.