AI's Influence on Advanced Packaging: Mid-Year Briefing Highlights and Innovations

We have just published our mid-year Advanced Packaging Briefing in both a narrated video format and a slide format. Analyst’s briefings are a vehicle for our experts to provide additional context and supplementary analysis of recent reports while also talking about wider industry trends. In the latest briefing those trends are all about how artificial intelligence (AI) is exerting an outsized effect on the advanced packaging landscape.

Topics covered include TSMC’s recent announcements of an expanded technology offering for system-on-wafer (SoW) and new targets supporting continued interposer scaling in 2.5D chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) technology that is underpinning the AI boom. That new target is twice the size of today’s largest announced devices, while the addition of a chip-on-wafer process flow in SoW will be able to support the packaging of entire accelerator clusters. To contextualize these announcements the history of 2.5D interposer scaling as deployed for AI hardware is illustrated and analyzed.

In addition to other general subjects – like a road map to the future of chiplet design – the briefing also contains additional analysis of our recent technical reports. Excitingly, since the last video briefing our reports have covered four new packaging technologies, all of which are discussed further in the briefing:

• Intel’s 36 µm Foveros 2.5D technology in the Meteor Lake laptop processor
• Samsung’s silicon interposer cube (I-CubeS) as used in Baidu’s Kunlun 1-T AI accelerator
• Samsung’s wafer-level fanout package-on-package (PoP) from the Exynos 2400 mobile processor
• TSMC’s multichip integrated fanout (InFO-M) process from Apple’s R1 processor in the Vision Pro headset