In August we posted a report titled "Foxconn Eying More SiP Business from Apple with New Strategic Partnership with Taiwan's SPIL." The supply chain report stated at the time that Hon-Hai (Foxconn) had reached an agreement with Silicon Precision Industries (SPIL) to form a strategic partnership through share swaps. It was reported that the deal was aimed at fending off a tender offer bid from rival Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE). ASE announced recently that it planned to buy up a 25% stake in SPIL.

The original report went as far to state that SPIL and Foxconn said that they'll cooperate to develop advanced packaging technologies including SiP and integrated fan-out (InFO) wafer-level packaging (WLP) technology, as well as advanced packaging materials such as embedded substrates.

Today, the Wall Street Journal has now jumped into this developing story by adding that that SPIL is holding a shareholder meeting tomorrow at which it hopes to seal the deal with Foxconn. ASE has sent letters to shareholders, urging them to vote against the share swap. ASE can't vote on Thursday because its stake purchase wasn't registered in time.

The WSJ report noted that "Apple alone will account for around $3.1 billion in SiP orders this year, and that amount could more than double to $6.5 billion in 2017, according to estimates by Bernstein Research."

In a May report we noted that "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will have its backend integrated fan-out (InFO) wafer-level packaging (WLP) technology ready for 16nm chips, eyeing orders for Apple's A10 processors."

I further noted in that report that the IEEE digital library describes InFO-WLP this way: "For the first time, radio frequency (RF) circuits with InFO-WLP have been fabricated to illustrate how the high Q inductor can be used to dramatically improve performance and power consumption concurrently." Japan's i-Micronews adds that InFO-WLP "will enable high-definition video streaming and fast file transfer applications," which could be very appealing to Apple if they wish to bring Apple TV to the iPhone as a streaming TV service over the next two years."

The fact that Foxconn and Silicon Precision Industries are focused on developing this same technology would strongly suggest that this is what Apple is specifically requesting from suppliers. Apple likely needs a strong secondary supplier to TSMC and tomorrow's deal may be what the doctor ordered. This is certainly getting interesting as the stars are now aligning to form the supply chain for driving the iPhone 7.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Comments are reviewed daily from 4am to 6pm PST and sporadically over the weekend.