LED Packaging Technology and Market Trends 2014

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Oct 13, 2014, 07:24 ET

DUBLIN, Oct. 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "LED Packaging Technology and Market Trends 2014" report to their offering.

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Following the LED TV crisis and with the entry of Chinese players, positioning has been reshuffled in the LED industry. The product quality of Chinese LED manufacturers has increased to a level where they are now real competitors for all players. In such a highly competitive environment, three major challenges lie ahead for the LED industry regarding the General Lighting market: efficacy improvement, cost decrease and color consistency increase.

To answer these challenges, several players have now turned to Flip Chip (FC) LED, as these components present several advantages over traditional horizontal (MESA) and vertical LEDs: they are wire-bonding free, can be driven at higher current, and have a smaller size package.

And although the FC LED technology has been launched for quite a long time (by Lumileds), it was restricted from "popularization" due to technical / technological barriers (low yield regarding bumping / eutectic process -). Additionally, the financial investment required (for packaging equipment) represented a strong barrier in an industry that was still recovering. But the technology has gradually attracted attention from the lighting, backlighting and flash markets, becoming one the most important developing items this year.

Whereas Flip Chip LED represented only 11% of overall high power LED packaging in 2013, we expect this component to represent 34% by 2020. Flip Chip LED will take market share from vertical LED that will represent 27% of overall high power LED packages by 2020.

In addition to offering an increased "performance / cost" ratio, Flip Chip LEDs are also a key enabling technology for the development of Chip Scale Package (CSP) that could allow for further cost reduction.

CSPs are novel to the LED industry but they are the mainstay of the semiconductor industry. Development of CSPs in the Silicon ICs was driven by miniaturization, improved thermal management, higher reliability, and simply the need to connect to an ever increasing pin-count on an ever shrinking die. Chip Scale packages also enabled a reduction in device parasitic and allowed for ease of integration into Level 2 packaging (e.g.: module packaging for LED). It is therefore a natural evolution for this packaging innovation to proliferate into other industries (such as the LED industry).

Basically, a CSP represents a single chip direct mountable package that is the same size as the chip. Regarding LED devices, CSPs are made of a blue FC LED die on which a phosphor layer is coated (the main application of such package being General Lighting). CSP presents several advantages (miniaturized size, better thermal contact to substrates -).

However, eliminating several process steps of traditional LED packaging, CSPs are also having an impact on the industry structure with some LED chip manufacturers supplying their products directly to LED module manufacturers. At middle and long term, this technology could make chip manufacturers supply directly to module manufacturers.

Key Topics Covered:

Executive summary

LED market overview

LED packaging overview

2013/2014 trends

Wafer bonding

Substrate removal

Die singulation

Thermal management - Packaging substrates (Including COB)

Thermal management - Module substrates

ESD protection

Encapsulation and optics

Phosphors

Testing and binning

Wafer Level Packaging

General conclusion