Another chip factory has been added to the world, targeting advanced packaging!
On October 11, Amkor announced the official opening of its chip factory in Yen Phong 2C Industrial Park, Bac Ninh Province, Vietnam. The new factory will become Amkor's largest factory, covering an area of 57 acres. It will invest US$1.6 billion (approximately RMB 11.682 billion) before 2035. It will mainly provide advanced system-level packaging and testing solutions to meet the semiconductor industry's demand for advanced packaging. needs. However, the company has not yet disclosed the production capacity and testing capabilities of the new plant.
Multiple parties attack CoWoS
The artificial intelligence (AI) craze continues, driving demand for CoWoS production capacity, and TSMC benefits from this. The company holds the majority of CoWoS production capacity orders.
However, ASE Investment Control, Amkor, UMC, etc. also manufacture CoWoS card slots. The industry believes that TSMC’s CoWoS production capacity will be in short supply in the next few quarters, so part of the production capacity demand is expected to be transferred to the Amkor factory.
Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips, which are currently hot around the world, use 2.5D packaging technology integration, and TSMC is responsible for this part. Some time ago, NVIDIA revealed that new products such as the AI chip GH200 and the general server chip L40S are about to be mass-produced. It has been reported in the market that L40S does not require 2.5D packaging. ASE Group and its affiliates such as Silicon Products and Amkor will share the back-end packaging orders.
According to TrendForce, as the strong demand for AI continues, it is estimated that NVIDIA will also evaluate other similar advanced packaging foreign aids for CoWoS-related processes, such as Amkor or Samsung, to cope with the situation where supply may exceed demand.
Amkor has announced plans to expand its CoWoS-like advanced packaging capacity. According to the media citing packaging and testing industry insiders, Amkor's monthly production capacity of 2.5D advanced packaging will be about 3,000 pieces in early 2023. It is expected to increase to 5,000 pieces by the end of 2023 and the first half of 2024, and strive to achieve a multiple growth level of 7,000 pieces by the end of 2024.
ASE Investment Control stated that it has service projects in advanced packaging CoWoS related fields. According to a report from Taiwanese media Economic Daily, with the recent shortage of CoWoS production capacity, ASE Semiconductor Layout, a subsidiary of ASE Investment Holdings, was selected by major chip manufacturers to undertake the post-CoWo OS business because of its fan-out FOCoS-Bridge packaging technology.
At the same time, Korean media Etnews reported in mid-September that in order to catch up with TSMC’s advanced packaging of artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Samsung will launch FO-PLP’s 2.5D advanced packaging technology to attract customers. The Advanced Packaging (AVP) team of Samsung DS Department began to develop FO-PLP advanced packaging for 2.5D chip packaging, which can integrate SoC and HBM into the silicon interposer to build a complete chip.
It is worth mentioning that Samsung FO-PLP 2.5D is packaged on a square substrate, and TSMC CoWoS 2.5D is a circular substrate. Samsung FO-PLP 2.5D will not have edge substrate loss problems and has higher productivity, but due to the need to The process of transplanting the chip from wafer to square substrate is complicated.
Strong demand for CoWoS will continue
CoWoS is a 2.5D and 3D packaging technology, which means stacking chips and then packaging them on a substrate to ultimately form a 2.5D and 3D form. It can reduce chip space, while also reducing power consumption and costs. CoWoS packaging technology is used in high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, data centers, 5G, Internet of Things, automotive electronics and other fields.
TrendForce Research shows that chips such as AI and HPC have an increasing demand for advanced packaging technology. Among them, TSMC’s CoWoS is currently the main adopter of AI server chips. CoWoS packaging technology is mainly divided into two stages: CoW and oS. Among them, CoW mainly integrates various Logic ICs (such as CPU, GPU, AISC, etc.) and HBM memory, etc. In addition, the oS part uses the above-mentioned CoW as a bump (Solder Bump). Waiting for bonding, packaging on the substrate, and finally integrated into the PCBA, it becomes the main computing unit of the server motherboard, and forms a complete AI server system with other components such as network, storage, power supply unit (PSU) and other I/O. .
TrendForce has observed that it is estimated that due to the strong demand for high-end AI chips and HBM, TSMC's CoWoS monthly production capacity is expected to reach 12K by the end of 2023. Among them, NVIDIA's demand for CoWoS production capacity is higher than that at the beginning of the year, driven by the demand for related AI servers such as A100 and H100. , is estimated to increase by nearly 50%. Coupled with the growing demand for high-end AI chips such as AMD and Google, CoWoS production capacity will be more urgent in the second half of the year, and this strong demand will continue until 2024. It is estimated that if relevant equipment is ready, advanced packaging Production capacity will increase by another 30% to 40%
