Chip Last Fan Out as an Alternative to Chip First
Authors: Chen Scott , Wang Simon , Lee Coltrane , Hsieh Adren , Hunt John , Chen William 
Published: November 2015

Smart phones & other portable devices have dominated Semiconductor growth, and drive IC packages smaller, lighter & thinner, and they continue to integrate more functions in that smaller volume. Besides SOC solutions driven by design houses or system companies, we have seen more packages of Quad Flat Non-lead (QFN), wafer level CSP (WLCSP), and system in package (SIP) being widely used in these smart phones & mobile devices.. Fan out WLCSP (FOWLP) has great potential to be the next new package for the smart phone mobility application.

Two factors have driven fan out WLCSP (FOWLP) package technology in the last few years. The first is the advancing technology nodes which allow the shrinkage of die, allowing more die per wafer. However this comes at the cost of reduced package area for I/Os such as solder ball interconnects. The second and potentially more important factor relates to the demand of the market for more functions. Not all silicon functionality benefits from these advanced nodes, and merely adds to the cost of the die. This has driven the designers to partitioning of desired functionality into multiple die, which in turn requires effective interconnection of these separate die. The packaging technology that has evolved to solve these two situations has been Fan Out Wafer Level Packaging (FOWLP).

Up to date FOWLP used chip first processing, in which the bare die was molded into a wafer shaped carrier with die pads exposed. Typically sputtering is used to provide interconnects to the die pad followed by patterned electroplating of redistribution lines (RDL) to “Fan Out” the next level interconnect pads to regions that can extend on to the molded material beyond the die perimeter. These processes require the use of relatively expensive semiconductor front end classes of equipment and are tailored to handle the reconstituted molded plastic wafers.

We will describe a new alternative to chip first FOWLP, an alternative which meets the needs of a large percentage of the applications requiring a packaging technology such as FOWLP. This new package has been in production in ASE for over a year, and uses a “Chip Last” approach to the problem of increasing useable interconnect pad area. Die which have been bumped with Copper(Cu) Pillars are mass reflowed onto a low cost coreless substrate, followed by over molding which also serves as the die underfill. The Cu pillars allow direct connection to die pads at 50 μm pitch or below, negating the requirement for RDL formation on the die. The use of embedded traces allows for fine lines and spaces down to 15μm or less, and bonding directly on to the bare Copper. The Cu Pillars are bonded to one side of the Copper trace, and the solderballs or LGA pads are directly on the opposite side of the Copper. This makes the substrate to be effectively only as thick as the Copper used in the traces, and allows the final package to be as thin as 400μm. Since this uses existing high volume packaging infrastructures, more complex assemblies including multiple die, inclusion of passive components, and 3D structures can be easily implemented. We have designated this package structure “Fan Out Chip Last Package (FOCLP)”

For higher end applications we will show the ability to use a high density substrate process for use in more demanding chip last fan out packages