Changes Coming to the CIS Ecosystem

Speaking at the Market Symposium at SEMICON West on Monday, Dan Gamota, Vice President, Manufacturing, Innovation & Product Industrialization, Jabil, described a changing landscape for the electronics manufacturing ecosystem, where the lines between chip-makers, foundries, electronics manufacturing service (EMS) providers and OSATS (outsourced assembly and test services) are blurring. 

Gamota said Jabil, which is a leading EMS provider, is investing in capabilities to address what he calls the Complex Integration Systems (CIS) market, which he defines as product such as ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) for vehicles, photonics for high performance computing and high speed communications, and AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) for multi-sensory experiences. “From my vantage point, a complex integrated system could either be a consumer product, such as a camera module, or it could be something like a high-performance computing silicon photonics module. The complex integrated system may have optics, photonics, electronics, mechanics, substrates, and materials, all of these in a very small, compact form factor,” he said. Examples include:

• Optics – CMOS, lens, mirror
• Photonics – PIC, fiber, LED
• Electronics – bare die, SMT, PTH
• Mechanics – enclosures, motors, servos, micropumps
• Substates – rigid, flexible, stretchable
• Materials – electrical, thermal, optical, mechanical

He said CIS products are high value, high growth markets. “We’re starting to see a significant amount of movement along the value chain that is allowing us to start realizing some of these complex integrated systems,” Gamota said. “They’re definitely robust revenue streams.”

Manufacturing and test solutions for complex integrated systems require a resilient and efficient supply chain, Gamota said, that offers end-to-end services providers leveraging capabilities from 1^st level (foundries), 2^nd level (OSAT) and 3^rd level (EMS).

What’s new is that this landscape is shifting, with each level adding capabilities to meet customer demand – in essence competing with one another in some ways. “Customers now are requesting that they no longer go from the foundry and then ship it to an OSAT, and the OSAT ships it to the EMS,” he said. He noted that in the age of “smart everything,” more complex integrated systems are being integrated in products that historically had a very small content in terms of all electronics. “There’s a significant number of capabilities that historically may have been only in a semiconductor, an OSAT, or an EMS,” Gamota said. “Now you really see a blurring.”

“The end goal is the customer enjoying the fact that they know that their product has been built by the same requirements and quality that has always been delivered by the electronics ecosystem,” he added.

As one example, Gamota said EMS providers used to be mostly concerned with soldering components onto a printed circuit board. “Now it’s not solder, it’s precision placement, precision dispensing, and active alignment,” he said. At the show this week, he said expect to hear a lot about technologies such as bumps and pillars and ribbon wires. 

Gamota said this changing landscape means the foundries, OSATS and EMS providers need to find ways to collectively work together. “It’s a supply chain with many different moving pieces that, collectively, everybody owns,” he said. “How do we make sure that supply chain doesn’t have any friction in it has that resilience that we all need to have going forward?”

At SEMICON West, Gamota said expect to see companies that have made that bridge between the EMS world and the OSAT world. “Now, they basically offer the same type of services. Where before, they presented to you components or packaged components, the same companies now offer you wafers and singulated die,” he said.  This change requires a better understanding of the data analytics required, and the standard protocols that are used in the semiconductor community.