By Li Panpan 

The Post-Moore era brings excellent potential to the packing and testing industry. China’s JCET(长电科技) Group will continue to lead advanced packaging development, said Zheng Li, CEO of the company in an interview with JW Insights.

The interview took place at the 29th CSPT (China Semiconductor Packing & Testing Annual Conference) on March 15-16 in Jiangyin of Jiangsu Province in eastern China.  

JCET Group ranks first in the Chinese mainland and the third in the world in terms of market size, and with more input in R&D,

Statistics from research agency Yole showed that the market size of advanced packaging in 2021 would be about $35 billion, accounting for about 45% of the industry. 

In the post-Moore era, advanced packaging has become a “hot spot” for the IC industry. It has also become JCET Group’s main source of income, mainly from system-in-package, flip-chip, and wafer-level packaging (WLP). Zheng Li said, “Packaging and testing traditionally are not important in the IC industry chain. However, with the coming of the post-Moore era, the industry has paid more attention to advanced packaging that integrates structures.” 

With high-density WLP, 2.5D/3D integration, system-level (SiP), high-performance flip-chip, and wire-bond packaging technologies, JCET Group’s products and services cover mainstream applications like network communications, mobile devices, high-performance computing, automotive electronics, big data storage, and others. “JCET Group has continuously increased its R&D investment in advanced packaging.” In the first three quarters of 2021, its R&D expenses accounted for 4% of revenue in the same period.” said Zheng.

In 2021, JCET Group achieved a total operating income of RMB30.5 billion ($4.79 billion) and an operating profit of RMB3.17 billion ($498.06 million), a year-on-year increase of 15.3% and 119.2%, respectively.

Founded in 1972 and headquartered in Jiangyin, JCET Group acquired testing houses in southeast Asia and became a leading global semiconductor system integrated packaging and test provider, offering a full range of turnkey services that include semiconductor package integration design and characterization, R&D, wafer probe, wafer bumping, package assembly, final test and drop shipment to vendors around the world. JCET Group is building its core competitiveness in four application fields: automobiles, communications, high-performance computing, and storage.

With strong potential in the IC industry, it is necessary to integrate design, manufacturing, packaging, and testing for coordinated development. “JCET’s growth is driven by the strong development of the whole IC industry, its efforts in popular application fields, and its ability in organizing industry resources both at home and abroad,” added Zheng. 

Advanced packaging brings vast potential in high-density chip integration, performance improvement, volume miniaturization, and cost reduction, but complicated requirements for packaging companies. Zheng Li believes that the packaging and testing industry will be intelligent manufacturing in five to ten years. So companies should invest more in technological innovation to improve the industry and avoid repeated competition.