Accelerating the AI Economy through Heterogeneous Integration

By Yin Chang, ASE

November 21, 2024

Yin Chang highlights the transition from an internet economy to an AI economy, projecting a tripling of semiconductor demand to 30 billion units and a market value of $1 trillion. Heterogeneous Integration through advanced packaging has played a pivotal role in enabling the AI economy to transform our world, providing AI chip architects with innovative solutions to optimize chip layout for performance and energy efficiency.

The world is rapidly transitioning from an internet economy to an AI economy. In the internet economy, we stayed constantly connected to the internet 24/7 through our smartphones, PCs, and IoT devices. However, in the AI economy, every aspect of our lives are interwoven with artificial intelligence. You may already be familiar with AI tools such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, which answer questions and generate human-like text, images and even videos. In the future, multimodal AI can simulate human bio-senses, enabling it to see, hear, and even smell on our behalf. Beyond this, agentic AI will understand its environment, set goals, and take actions with minimal direct human intervention. These are just a few examples of AI’s transformative potential. And as we continue on this journey, we will need greater innovation in semiconductor technology and advanced packaging solutions in order to fully realize the true power of AI.

What will AI bring?

Looking back at the history of technology-driven opportunities, we understand that every technology inflection point has led to a significant increase in the demand for units. Fifty years ago, the aerospace industry required only thousands of units, but with the rise of mobile phones, demand surged to 2 billion units, then smart IoT devices further expanded this to 10 billion units.

We believe AI will drive even greater demand – tripling it to 30 billion units within a relatively short period of time. This growth is being fueled by the emerging people-machine-machine-people (PMMP) communication model where our mobile phone runs various AI applications by interacting with multiple servers and clouds to deliver real-time information and services. These continuous machine-to-machine connections are propelling the semiconductor industry toward a $1 trillion dollar market.

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