Research effort goes commercial to cash in on expected boom -- Project seeds foundries for MCMs in Europe
Peter Clarke
Stockholm, Sweden - Effectively marking the beginning of a European foundry market in multichip modules, a collaborative R&D project called Europractice MCM is being turned into a commercial operation. EPMCM S.A., based here, expects to capitalize on a predicted boom in MCM manufacturing for such applications as mobile phones and terminals, and automotive electronics.
According to packaging consultants BPA Group Ltd. (Dorking, England), the European MCM market is expected to grow from $448 million in 1997 to about $4 billion in 2002. More significant for the Swedish startup is that the non-captive part of the market is pegged as increasing from $89 million in 1997 to $1.2 billion over the same period.
The newly formed EPMCM is jointly owned by five research institutes that contributed to Europractice MCM, a training and awareness service organized as part of the European R&D program Esprit. They are the Industrial Microelectronics Center (Linkoping, Sweden), IMEC (Leuven, Belgium), the Fraunhofer Institute (Berlin), ETH (Zurich) and the National Microelectronics Research Center (Cork, Republic of Ireland).
"We now have a chance to create a strong MCM commercial structure in Europe," said Per Nilsson, managing director of EPMCM. "The formation of EPMCM is indicative of the growing requirement for high-density, system-on-a-chip performance, particularly in communications, automotive and industrial control applications."
To help European equipment makers gain from high-density packaging, EPMCM will offer design services through the parent research groups, then pass volume work to one or more of 20 European companies that can make MCMs. They include Alcatel, Bull, Saab, Dassault, GEC-Marconi, Siemens, Solectron and Thomson-CSF. All have been Europractice members.
The collaborative project, due to end next October, has run for three years. It generated about $1.6 million in revenue from MCM design starts in the past year. These are expected to generate projects with manufacturing volume worth $15 million a year, participants said.
Marten Armgarth, manager of the interconnect and packaging group at the Industrial Microelectronics Center, said leading mobile phone manufacturers Nokia and Ericsson have asked the Europractice project to investigate using advanced MCM technologies. "The Nokia 9000 communicator already has an MCM and next-generation terminals will definitely have MCMs inside," he said.
Nilsson said that, as a commercial company, EPMCM will be open to approaches from around the world, although initially interest would necessarily come from companies with a stake in European manufacturing. "Today we have European suppliers and a local sales force. There might be an opportunity to extend the network to North America and the Far East." He added: "We are currently evaluating non-European manufacturers to continue improving the EPMCM offer."
Armgarth said: "There was recognition a couple of years ago that we were being left behind [in MCM] and that was one reason for the formation of Europractice MCM."
Armgarth said MCMs can save on space, weight and power. He cited the example of startup micro-Blox AG (Zurich), which used MCM packaging technology to reduce by two-thirds the size of a global positioning by satellite system.
"A lot of people think that MCMs are expensive, but they can be cost neutral when you look at overall system cost," Armgarth said. "For example, the use of an MCM can allow few layers to be used in a supporting pcb. Different customers have different driving forces."
As for power consumption, "Use of an MCM can reduce the number of passive components required by up to 40 percent and that saves power," he said.
Copyright ® 1998 CMP Media Inc.
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