A recent scouting incident made the open and secret battle between Samsung and TSMC once again the focus of the industry's attention. Lin Juncheng, the deputy director of R&D who worked for TSMC for 19 years, switched to Samsung as the vice president of the advanced packaging business team in the semiconductor division.
Although Lin Juncheng has already left TSMC, his technical experience is closely intertwined with the development of TSMC's advanced packaging technology.
With this strong talent, Samsung is bound to catch up quickly in the field of advanced packaging, and a new round of full-scale competition will also begin in the field of wafer foundry.
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Lim Chun-sung's packaging technology career did have many highlights. He has led TSMC's R&D team to establish two major product lines: one is the CoWOS product line, and the other is Info/Info-pop. The former introduced Xilinx FPGA products, while the latter helped TSMC win orders for Apple's A10 processor. After joining Micron in 2019, he also helped the R&D team establish the 3DIC advanced package development product line.
The industry is very appreciative of Lin Juncheng's ability to write patents. While working at TSMC, he co-ordinated to apply for more than 450 US patents. In the few years he moved to Tianhong as CEO, it is said that the number of patents also broke previous records, contributing important strength to Tianhong's transformation and development.
Lin Juncheng joined Samsung's newly established Advanced Packaging Business Team (Advanced Packaging Business Team). The department was established in 2022, initially known as the Advanced Packaging Commercial Work Team, and upgraded to a permanent organization this year. Lim Chun-sung will advance the development of advanced packaging technology as vice president.
Regarding Lim Chun-sung's addition, industry insiders believe that from a development perspective, Lim Chun-shing will be a good help. If from the perspective of process improvement, this involves the ability and tacit agreement of the original team. If leaders want to lead team adjustments in existing organizations, they also need to cross cultural barriers and organizational identity thresholds.
Samsung has been promoting the semiconductor foundry business in recent years, and has continuously adjusted its organizational structure to this end. Since Qing Guixian, the new president of the Semiconductor Business and Device Solution Division (DS), took office, he has actively carried out organizational changes to strengthen the system semiconductor business, including the layout for advanced packaging.
The Advanced Packaging Business Group falls under the direct control of Qing Guixian and is currently headed by Vice President King Moon-soo. Before finding Lim Joon-sung, Samsung Electronics sought Kim Woo-pyung, vice president from Apple, and assigned him to take over the head of the US Packaging Solution Center.
Currently, Lim Chun-sung's specific responsibilities are unknown. As a result, industry insiders said, “It depends on how much success he can achieve in the end, and we also need to see what kind of strategy he will adopt at Samsung. Will he make changes first and then improve the business, or will he be dissatisfied?”
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Samsung is not without achievements in advanced packaging; it has also established a complete set of solutions in wafer foundry. The series, all under the name “Cube”, covers solutions based on an intermediate layer (I-Cube), hybrid solutions (H-Cube), and vertical chip integration (X-Cube) without convex blocks. Among them, H-Cube is its latest 2.5D package solution, while X-Cube specifically targets 3D packaging.
In 2018, the development of Samsung Electronics' 3D packaging technology “X-Cube” was completed. Unlike previous parallel packages of multiple chips, the new X-Cube3D package allows multiple chips to be stacked and packaged, making the finished chip structure more compact. The communication connection between the chips uses TSV technology instead of traditional wires. According to reports, Samsung has stacked 4 SRAMs on logic core computing chips through X-cube packaging technology and connected through TSV technology. X-Cube packaging technology has been applied to the 7nm EUV process and verified in the next generation 5nm process. In the future, it will target HPC, 5G, AI and other application fields.
However, Samsung has been stumbling in the actual production of advanced packaging. In 2022, Samsung planned to invest about 200 billion won (about 165 million US dollars) in a semiconductor wafer fab in Cheonan, South Korea to establish an advanced packaging wafer-level fan package (FOWLP) production line, but it was questioned by many executives. The reason for their opposition is that there are no “key customers”, demand cannot be guaranteed, and even if a FOWLP production line is established, the production line cannot be fully utilized.
Previously, neither its main customers nor Samsung itself were very positive about FOWLP packaging technology. Samsung has great confidence in its PoP; Package on Package technology (PoP; Package on Package) and believes in its ability to continue to maintain its leading position. However, it was only after TSMC won Apple's A10 processor order with FOWLP that Samsung's attitude towards FOWLP changed 180 degrees.
According to foreign media reports, Samsung also invested a lot of money in 2017 to prepare to develop the FOWLP process, and tapped Oh Kyung-seok, director of a semiconductor research institute from Intel, to take full responsibility for the whole process. At the time, Samsung firmly believed that once the packaging process was developed, the order for the Apple processor could be successfully taken back, but as of today, this big order is still firmly in the hands of TSMC.
Samsung is now integrating various resources in an effort to regain lost ground in advanced packaging. To this end, it has announced a series of technology roadmaps, including accelerating the promotion of advanced packaging technology that accelerates 2.5D/3D heterogeneous integration. These include the X-Cube, a 3D advanced package using the micro bump (micro bump) process, which will enter mass production in 2024, and the advanced packaging technology for X-Cube, which has no convex process, will be launched in 2026.
However, there are still many doubts in the industry about how far Samsung can go in advanced packaging. Industry insiders pointed out that Samsung's capital expenditure in 2022 was not high, and the Advanced Packaging Division was only recently spun off. Its internal organization has always been a problem of frequent adjustments, which will put high pressure on teams that have to face technical challenges over a long period of time; furthermore, the commitment and cooperation of the core team is also critical, but I'm afraid this part is even more challenging under Samsung's frequent changeover of positions.
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Advanced packaging is increasingly important to the wafer foundry business. As Intel pointed out, the industry is now entering a new golden age of semiconductors. Chip manufacturing in this era requires a shift from traditional wafer foundry model thinking to “system wafer foundry.”
Therefore, advanced packaging, open chiplet (chiplet) ecosystems, and software will all be organic components of the new OEM model.
As a leader in the industry, TSMC won big orders from Apple for advanced packaging in the past, but now it has successfully integrated its 3D IC packaging technology platforms such as “SOIC, INFO, and COWoS”, and named it “3DFabric” to provide the most advanced 3D IC technology in the industry, from IC stacking to packaging, and OEM services.
Wei Zhejia, president of TSMC, pointed out that the 3DFabric packaging technology platform provides complete 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging technology. It can complement the company's existing high-end and advanced semiconductor wafer foundry process technology to help customers who place orders successfully achieve their new generation, high-speed computing product market development vision.
It can be seen from this that advanced packaging processes play a key role in “product optimization”, and TSMC also plays a key integration role in the upstream and downstream vertical supply chains of the industry, providing customers with complete “one-stop” integration services from front-end design to back-end packaging.
Naturally, Samsung, which wants to compete with TSMC for the first place in wafer foundry, also understands the mystery, so it invests a lot of resources in developing advanced packaging.
However, TSMC also has an invisible advantage that Samsung does not have. TSMC achieved a huge gap in the packaging field by partnering with world-class back-end packaging and testing companies — Sun Moon Light (ranked 1st), Silicon (4th), and Licheng (5th).
However, in South Korea's back-end semiconductor packaging and testing industry, there are currently only 4 of the top 25 companies in the world, including Hana Micron, SFA Semiconductor, LB Semiconductor, and Nepes. Their combined market share is far below full strength.
South Korea's back-end semiconductor sealing and testing industry is still facing a shortage of manpower. As of 2020, Korea's packaging talent was only about 500, but TSMC's R&D talent in closed testing increased 2.6 times from 2,881 in 2010 to 7404 in 2020.
Relevant sources pointed out that TSMC's biggest advantage in getting orders from Apple is back-end sealing and testing technology. Therefore, the Korean semiconductor industry must cultivate excellent back-end sealing and testing companies before Samsung has a chance to surpass TSMC.