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SEPTEMBER 2018 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 47 integration. There are still challenges in adapt- ing mSAP for board fabrication; current SLPs are not fully fabricated by mSAP but a mixture of subtractive and mSAP (Figure 2). Research and development is being done to gain more control of the fabrication process and further decrease feature sizes. Figure 2 shows the vision of the advanced substrate technology segmentation regarding the demanded featured size. As can be seen, technologies that are traditionally used for dif- ferent manufacturing steps start to overlap. SLP today gives an example of packaging tech- nology used for board fabrication, in the fu- ture, other technologies will overlap as well and create potential new field of competition in the semiconductor industry. Although only two smartphone manufac- turers have adapted SLP to their flagship phones, it is expected that other large smart- phone manufacturers such as Huawei, Xiaomi, and Vivo will follow this trend in the next few years. Smartphone manufacturers will contin- ue the tendency of increasing integration in a fixed board area to add functions or to pro- vide space for additional battery capacity. Oth- er products that require strong miniaturization such as wearables, tablets, and tablet-PCs will most likely be the next products to adopt SLP. While SLP is an answer to both scaling and functional demand today, there are more de- mands that need to be answered soon. The ad- vanced substrate market will change dramat- ically compared to the past (Figure 3). The downsizing of board feature size and adoption of SLP will decrease the traditional PCB mar- ket; the evolving high-density fan-out (HDFO) technology along with downsizing of IC sub- strate will also decrease the IC substrate mar- ket. Although the market might increase slow- er in terms of volume, the added value of ad- vanced substrates will keep increasing. Today, the demand of scaling and function has strongly affected the semiconductor pack- Figure 2: Advanced substrate technology segmentation projection.