2024 Forecast: Hybrid Bonding Steps Up

By Zvi Or-Bach, President and CEO, MonolithIC 3D Inc.

December 7, 2023

2024 is poised to be the inflection point for commercial use of hybrid bonding, is poised to become a central technology in all major semiconductor segments: logic, DRAM, and NAND.

YMTC introduced the use of hybrid bonding for 3D NAND a few years ago, and now Kioxia/WD, one of the main 3D NAND vendors, is also releasing a 218 (BiCS8) 3D NAND product to volume production that utilizes hybrid bonding. This indicates the coming trend in NAND devices, termed "CMOS Directly Bonded to Array" (CBA).

For DRAM, it has been announced that the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) product, HBM4, will be introduced in 2025 utilizing hybrid bonding. Additionally, all DRAM vendors are actively pursuing 3D DRAM development using hybrid bonding. Samsung has disclosed an alternative for DRAM using 4F2 Cell and Hybrid Bonding, which will be presented at this year's IEDM and may be introduced to the market soon.

Early use of hybrid bonding in logic products took place in 2023 with AMD's 3D Cache technology. In 2024, Intel is scheduled to release its A20 process using Back Side Power Delivery (BSPD), also called PowerVia, which also uses bonding and extreme thinning technology. Extreme thinning overcomes one of the handicaps of 3D technologies, through-silicon vias (TSVs), using nano-TSVs, which are essentially simple via processes. As major foundries embrace extreme thinning, it is expected that many new applications of 3D heterogeneous integration using hybrid bonding will emerge soon after.

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