Data Center AI Growth Faces Challenging Bottlenecks


AI is rocketing ahead. It is the biggest industrial revolution of our age. AI adoption is growing, but still most are at early stages of learning. Anthropic, the leading frontier model provider with an annualized revenue run rate (ARR) of ~$47 billion with OpenAI close behind at ~$30 billion (Forbes). Google Gemini revenues aren’t broken out but Google Gemini processes over 3.2 quadrillion... » read more

Automated 310mm Panel-Level Packaging to Accelerate AI Innovation: Tech Brief


This shift to panel-level packaging addresses critical industry challenges, including rising interposer sizes and declining wafer-level efficiency. The larger panel format supports higher throughput, reduced cycle time, and lower cost per package, while enabling integration of increasingly complex multi-die architectures. These benefits are especially impactful for AI data center and HPC applic... » read more

Making On-Chip Photonics Manufacturable


Key Takeaways: System-level energy and bandwidth pressures are pulling optics into the package faster than the manufacturing flow can mature. Photonics combines front-end fabrication, materials, thermal, cleanliness, and test into one problem that can’t be solved domain by domain. Test is moving upstream because discovering an optical failure after final assembly forfeits every goo... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


ECTC Panel-level packaging, hybrid bonding, new substrates, and fine-pitch interconnects topped the list of advanced packaging technologies at ECTC this week. Among the announcements: ASE launched an automated 310mm × 310mm panel-level packaging production line. Expected to enter production in the first half of 2027, the line is compatible with FOCoS and FOCoS-Bridge pa... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Manufacturing ASE and WUS are jointly building a ~$1.1B advanced packaging hub in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, for fan-out chip-on-substrate (FOCoS) and flip-chip ball grid array (FC BGA) technologies. The new site is expected to be completed by September 2029. SpaceX filed documents for a “Terafab” semiconductor manufacturing and computing facility at Gibbons Creek Reservoir in Texas, with a... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Advanced nodes and capacity The US Commerce Dept. told IC equipment makers to stop shipments to Hua Hong Group, China's No. 2 chipmaker, in order to protect America's lead, according to Reuters. Global AI competition is causing wafer and packaging shortages, but capacity increases are expected to come online later this year and in 2027 to ease the crunch, according to TrendForce. Leadi... » read more

Panel-Level Packaging’s Second Wave Meets Engineering Reality


Key Takeaways Panel-level packaging is arriving not because the engineering is ready, but because wafer-level economics are breaking down. Glass improves the warpage and dimensional stability problems of organic substrates but introduces a different class of failure modes that require materials solutions, not process adjustments. The central challenges of panel-level processing are m... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals, Funding Intel will join Elon Musk’s Terafab chip manufacturing project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Intel described its role as helping refactor silicon fab technology for a project targeting production of 1 TW/year of compute for AI and robotics applications. Intel and Google are expanding a multi-year collaboration on AI and cloud infrastructure, with Intel Xeon processo... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Arm uncorked its first internally developed CPU chip this week, aimed squarely at the agentic AI data center market. Arm CEO Rene Haas (pictured) emphasized the CPU's power efficiency and performance/watt compared to other AI processor architectures. "We are obsessed with efficiency, and if you think about one of the biggest appeals that Arm has had over the years, it is power profile," he ... » read more

Scaling AI Infrastructure: Overcoming Interconnect Bottlenecks Via CPO And Heterogeneous Integration


The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surpassed the capabilities of traditional monolithic compute architectures. The industry is shifting toward a systemic approach, where large-scale distributed clusters of GPUs/AI accelerators function as a single, unified computational engine to support the next generation of trillion-parameter models. Co-packaged optics (CPO) offers s... » read more

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