Europe’s Advanced Packaging Gap: Fraunhofer, Swissbit Target the Missing Middle

What it means for hiring

Fraunhofer and Swissbit are addressing what EE Times calls the missing middle in European advanced packaging: low-volume production, which sits between research and mass manufacturing. The argument is that Europe has both ends and needs an industrial model for the part in between.

The missing middle is a people problem at least as much as a capital one. Taking a process from something that works in an institute to something that runs repeatably at low volume is a distinct skill, and it belongs to neither the researchers nor the high-volume manufacturing engineers. The people who can do it have usually spent time on both sides, and in Europe most of them are inside the institutes rather than in industry. That is the group every advanced packaging start-up on the continent is trying to hire, and the institutes are not keen to lose them. For our own market this is the same scarcity we see in vacuum and thin film, where the person who can qualify a process is worth more than the person who can design one.

Read the original at EE Times .