Yole Développement unveil its Embedded Die in Package Patent Investigation report

A very young patent landscape dominated by a very small number of companies...

For this patent analysis 721 relevant and related patents have been selected and classified to further
analyze embedded IC IP situation.

Among the 1547 patent documents constituting the 596 relevant patent families, 84% are active (pending or granted) and 16% are inactive (revoked, expired or lapsed).

In addition, even if first patents for embedded IC are quite old, this technology is very young with
regard to the number of patents pending!

“About 180 assignees are involved in embedded die technologies while the top 10 assignees represent 53% of patents filed in the embedded die domain. Main business model involved in this area is substrate & PCB makers (which have been strongly involved in the PCB and back-end industries for a while) but we found a significant number of IDMs and OSATs which are looking closer and closer to this packaging technology,” announces Yole Développement.

Patents in the embedded domain are mainly filed by firms or universities located in Korea (33%), Japan (21%) and USA (19%). Japanese and American players were the early adopters of the technology and they are still deeply involved in this business. Korea emerged as new key player in
2005.

Yole Développement selected 10 companies among the most active players identified in this
complete statistical analysis to lead an accurate description of their patent portfolios. Yole Développement’s report also provides a database of all the relevant patents the company has analyzed in an Excel file, which allows multi-criteria searches. The criteria are basically those it used
for the technological segmentation:

• Patent information: patent publication number, link to the PDF document, oldest priority date, title, assignee, patent potential ranking, nb of citing patent families.

• Technological segmentation: chip placement / bonding, tape lamination, RDL, passivation & balling.

This complete description of the patent landscape is included in the first part of the report and
provides all the background material for the analysis of the embedded IC in package landscape. The
report provides a complete analysis of the patent landscape including geographical origins of the
patents, company or R&D organizations that have been granted the patents, historical data on when the companies have applied for patents in the last 20 years, inventors of the patents, expiration status, R&D collaborations…



Detailed analysis of the top 10 patent assignees for embedded IC technology

The report provides a deep dive into each of the patent portfolios of Yole Développement selected assignees, including SEMCO, ASE, Samsung, Unimicron, Intel, Imbera, Shinko, Murata, LG Innotek, Daeduck. For each of these companies, the Yole Développement’s report provides an in-depth analysis of the patent portfolio, highlighting the following points: company profile, company patent portfolio evolution, countries of deposition and origin of the patents, etc.

This analysis by company provides an in-depth view of the strengths and weaknesses of each patent portfolio and of the developments now implemented by each company.

An exhaustive comparison and an overall patent ranking!

Yole Développement’s report also includes a comparison between the 2 identified existing products using embedded IC technology, currently used for DCDC converter packaging: TI MicroSiP packaged by AT&S and Rohm device packaged by EPCOS TDK. Moreover, a ranking of the most important patents is provided in this report in order to highlight the most promising: which of all the analyzed documents could be blocking, which company owns which patents and the content of each patent. The ranking is based on a unique 14 parameter methodology which has been developed by Yole Développement.