Taipei, Taiwan
NCS
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In the largest single overseas funding in US historical past, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has unveiled a $100 billion investment, drawing international consideration and prompting concern in Taiwan.
TSMC, which produces greater than 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips that energy every part from smartphones and synthetic intelligence (AI) purposes to weapons, will construct two new advanced packaging amenities in Arizona, amongst others.
Here’s every part you want to learn about advanced packaging expertise, which has seen exponential demand development together with the international AI frenzy, and what meaning for the wrestle between the US and China for AI dominance.
While the two nations have introduced a short lived truce that rolled again disruptive three-digit tariffs for 90 days, the relationship remains tense due to ongoing feuding over chip restrictions imposed by the US and other issues.
Last month at Computex, an annual commerce present in Taipei that has been thrust beneath the limelight due to the AI growth, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang, instructed reporters that “the importance of advanced packaging for AI is very high,” proclaiming that “no one has pushed advanced packaging harder than me.”
Packaging usually refers to considered one of the manufacturing processes of semiconductor chips, which implies sealing a chip inside a protecting casing and mounting it to the motherboard that goes into an digital machine.
Advanced packaging, particularly, refers to strategies that permit extra chips — reminiscent of graphic processing items (GPU), central processing items (CPU) or excessive bandwidth reminiscence (HBM) — to be positioned nearer collectively, main to higher total efficiency, quicker transmission of knowledge and decrease vitality consumption.
Think of those chips as completely different departments inside an organization. The nearer these departments are to one another, the simpler it is, and much less time it takes, for folks to journey between them and change concepts, and the extra environment friendly the operation turns into.
“You’re trying to put the chips as close together as possible, and you’re also putting in different solutions to make the connection between the chips very easy,” Dan Nystedt, vp of Asia-based non-public funding agency TrioOrient, instructed NCS.
In a method, advanced packaging retains afloat Moore’s Law, the concept that the variety of transistors on microchips would double each two years, as breakthroughs in the chip fabrication course of turn out to be more and more expensive and harder.
While there are lots of varieties of advanced packaging applied sciences, CoWoS, quick for Chips-on-Wafer-on-Substrate and invented by TSMC, is arguably the finest identified that was thrown beneath the limelight since the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which sparked the AI frenzy.
It has even turn out to be a family identify in Taiwan, prompting Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), to say that the island is the “only place that you can say CoWoS and everybody would understand.”
Advanced packaging has turn out to be an enormous deal in the tech world as a result of it ensures AI purposes, which require plenty of complicated computing, run with out delays or glitches.
CoWoS is indispensable to producing AI processors, reminiscent of the GPUs produced by Nvidia and AMD which might be utilized in AI servers or information facilities.
“You could call it the Nvidia packaging process if you want to. Almost anyone making AI chips is using the CoWoS process,” stated Nystedt.
That is why demand for CoWoS expertise has skyrocketed. As a outcome, TSMC is scrambling to ramp up manufacturing capability.
In a go to to Taiwan in January, Huang instructed reporters that the quantity of advanced packaging capability at the moment accessible was “probably four times” what it was lower than two years in the past.
“The technology of packaging is very important to the future of computing,” he stated. “We now need to have very complicated advanced packaging to put many chips together into one giant chip.”
If advanced fabrication is one piece of the puzzle by way of chip manufacturing, advanced packaging is one other.
Analysts say having each items of that jigsaw in Arizona means the US can have a “one-stop shop” for chip manufacturing and a strengthened place for its AI arsenal, benefitting Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and Broadcom, a few of TSMC’s high purchasers.
“It ensures that the US has a complete supply chain from advanced manufacturing to advanced packaging, which would benefit the US’ competitiveness in AI chips,” Eric Chen, an analyst with market analysis agency Digitimes Research, instructed NCS.
Because advanced packaging applied sciences key to AI are at the moment solely produced in Taiwan, having it in Arizona additionally reduces potential provide chain dangers.
“Instead of having all eggs in one basket, CoWoS would be in Taiwan and also the US, and that makes you feel more safe and secure,” stated Nystedt.
While CoWoS obtained its second lately, the expertise has truly existed for a minimum of 15 years.
It was the brainchild of a workforce of engineers led by Chiang Shang-yi, who served two stints at TSMC and retired from the firm as its co-chief working officer.
Chiang first proposed growing the expertise in 2009 in an try to match extra transistors into chips and clear up bottlenecks in efficiency.
But when it was developed, few corporations took up the expertise due to the excessive value related to it.
“I only had one customer … I really became a joke (in the company), and there was so much pressure on me,” he recalled in a 2022 oral historical past challenge recorded for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
But the AI growth turned CoWoS round, making it considered one of the hottest applied sciences. “The result was beyond our original expectation,” Chiang stated.
In the international semiconductor provide chain, corporations specializing in packaging and testing providers are referred to as outsourced semiconductor meeting and check (OSAT) corporations.
In addition to TSMC, South Korea’s Samsung and America’s Intel, in addition to OSAT corporations together with China’s JCET Group, America’s Amkor and Taiwan’s ASE Group and SPIL are all key gamers in advanced packaging applied sciences.