Europe is traditionally strong in packaging chips. We build the most advanced machines for it here, but the packaging itself is done in Asia. However, with the increasingly strategic nature of technology, it makes sense to do it closer to home as well.
Europe’s place in the global back-end semicon ecosystem compares well with that in the front-end. Our companies provide the best machinery and technology, but the manufacturing itself pales to what Asia is doing there. The numbers speak for themselves. The EU produces only one in twelve chips, and we coat only one in thirty. This 3 or so percent is sales and not numbers of units, but we can safely say that Europe hardly plays a role in back-end production.
On the positive side, we Europeans are good at back-end machines. “We have strong technical skills and historically a long tradition in this market,” notes Steffen Kroehnert of Espat Consulting from Dresden, Germany. Kroehnert spent the past year researching the European chip packaging situation for SEMI Europe as part of the Pack4EU project. Pack4EU is a European Commission initiative to explore how to strengthen the European ecosystem and make supply chains for assembly and testing more resilient. Kroehnert doesn’t use the term “back-end” but prefers to speak more specifically of “semiconductor packaging, assembly and test” (SPAT), “because ‘back-end’ is very IDM-specific.”
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