At the recent Intel Architecture Day, Ramune Nagisetty revealed that Intel has been developing hybrid bonding technology to take it beyond the EMIB and Foveros technologies already in production.

This now means that two of the three largest chip manufacturers have hybrid bonding available – TSMC announced its SoIC platform a couple of years ago. Samsung is an Xperi licensee, though we don’t know if that includes their DBI® hybrid bonding.

Hybrid bonding went into volume production after Sony licensed the Zibond technology from Ziptronix (now part of Xperi) and introduced it almost five years ago into their CMOS image sensors (CIS) that use stacked sensor and image processors. Zibond was initially a wafer/wafer bonding technique focused on oxide/oxide interfaces, but it evolved to include copper/copper direct bonds, and Xperi rebranded it as Direct Bond Interconnect (DBI®). Not all companies use Xperi’s licensed technology, so the industry term for face/face wafer bonding with copper/copper interconnect has become “hybrid bonding” (HB). Now almost all of the stacked CIS manufacturers or their foundries have HB available. In the meantime, the process has evolved to give bonding pitches of >4 µm and pad diameters >2 µm.