Electronic packaging gears up for 5G mobile race

It is expected that by 2020, 5th generation mobile networks (5G mobile) services will perform 40x communication speed of the latest Long-Term Evolution - Advanced (LTE-A) services. With these trends, the memory bandwidth of high end smartphones will surpass 100GB/sec with 4x of the current one and Ethernet will enter the age of 400 Gigabit Ethernet (400GbE) with 4x of current 100GbE by 2020 respectively. Needless to say, data center servers must acquire data processing capacities capable of handling this huge volume of data. This paper focuses on the performance requirements in application fields that support the 5G era and the packaging technology roadmap that supports these applications.