LYON, FRANCE -- Flip chips made up 13% of all IC packages sold in 2010, and some 29% of the global IC  assembly, packaging and test market, a new research report says.

But while the new report from Yole Développement pegs the flip-chip market at $16 billion, the research firm believes the package style remains in a "growth" phase, with major technology and application and supply-chain transformations looming.

“Renewed interest in flip-chip technologies is motivated in many application areas concurrently by such factors as the rising cost of gold used for wire bonding, the need for low thickness devices, continued CMOS downscaling, higher currents and temperatures, and lower voltages”, says Christophe Zinck, project manager at Yole.

Yole said many sophisticated devices can no longer be packaged by wire bonding and mobile applications require footprint and weight reduction coupled with higher electrical performance (signal propagation and power distribution). It points to 28nm CMOS technology, which poses new quality and reliability constraints on interconnect technologies that may disqualify wire bonding, and increasing IO density, which requires new bumping and substrate technologies.

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