Sumitomo Bakelite Co. Ltd. (TYO:4203) is looking to make a horizontal expansion into new sectors of the semiconductor materials market. Aims here are to leverage the company’s strength of handling not only encapsulants-for which it has a world-leading market share-but also redistribution layer (RDL) resins in order to carve out new demand both domestically and abroad. The semiconductor industry is seeing not only process miniaturization but also a trend toward smaller packages, such as is seen with chip-scale packages. And this for a while made encapsulant demand sluggish, even as semiconductor production volume continued to rise. More recently, however, the tide has changed on this front, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) introducing the likes of fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP), as well as 3D packaging that combines this FOWLP technology with printed circuit boards.
展开▼
