At present, the proportion of packaging and testing in the integrated circuit industry is increasing, and the maturity of development is better than that of wafer manufacturing. Traditional packaging equipment includes grinding, scribing, mounting, bonding, flip-chip, etc., and advanced packaging will also use photolithography, etching, electroplating, PVD, CVD and other front-end equipment. According to SEMI statistics, in the past 10 years, the global packaging equipment market has grown at an average annual rate of 6.9%. In 2018, the global packaging equipment market reached US$4 billion. However, various packaging equipment markets are oligopolistic. For example, Japan's Disco monopolizes more than 80% of the global packaging key equipment thinner and dicing machine market. Other packaging equipment manufacturers include ASM Pacific, K&S, Besi, Disco, etc.

The localization rate of advanced ASM packaging equipment for integrated circuits is gradually increasing. For example, lithography machines for integrated circuit packaging, as well as equipment such as flip chip, etching, PVD, cleaning, development, and glue leveling, have all met the domestic advanced packaging needs. . The domestic production rate of front-end equipment for advanced packaging is relatively high, with more than 50% of photoetching machines, etching machines, and ball placement machines, but the overall localization rate of traditional packaging equipment does not exceed 10%. For a long time, the industry generally believes that the technical difficulty of packaging equipment is far lower than that of wafer manufacturing equipment, and the industry's attention is low, and industrial policies are inclined to wafer factories, packaging and testing plants, and wafer manufacturing equipment. Although the National Major Science and Technology 02 has increased its support in recent years, overall packaging equipment lacks industrial policy cultivation and verification opportunities from packaging and testing customers.

My country's packaging equipment is at the low end as a whole. There are very few applications in the packaging process of high-end integrated circuits. Individual models have relied on customized demand to enter the market, and a virtuous cycle of mass production driving high-end R&D has not yet formed. The author believes that the main reasons are as follows: First, China’s basic industry is weak, and core components are "jammed", such as air-floating spindles, which restrict the development of high-end thinning machines and dicing machines; second, equipment R&D investment is high, and equipment trial and error The high cost makes it difficult to form a market to feed back R&D, leading to a serious loss of core technical personnel; third, the reliability of domestic packaging equipment is an urgent problem that needs to be solved. The customers of packaging companies cannot accept domestic equipment, and there are few opportunities for trial and error of domestic equipment, and the industry development ecology needs to be solved. Improvement; Fourth, there is a shortage of high-end technical talents and teams in packaging equipment, key technologies have not been solved for a long time, and equipment performance has been slowly improved.