The Race To Glass Substrates

By Gregory Haley, SemiEngineering (May 29, 2024)

Replacing silicon and organic substrates requires huge shifts in manufacturing, creating challenges that will take years to iron out.

The chip industry is racing to develop glass for advanced packaging, setting the stage for one of the biggest shifts in chip materials in decades — and one that will introduce a broad new set of challenges that will take years to fully resolve.

Glass has been discussed as a replacement material for silicon and organic substrates for more than a decade, primarily in multi-die packages. But with Moore’s Law running out of steam, the shift away from planar chips to advanced packaging is now almost a given for leading-edge designs. The challenge now is how to build these devices more efficiently, and glass has emerged as a key enabler at the leading edge of packaging and lithography. Intel announced last year that it would introduce glass substrates in the latter part of this decade. And the U.S. government awarded Absolics, an affiliate of Korea’s SKC, $75 million under the U.S. CHIPS Act to build a 120,000 square-foot facility in Georgia to make glass substrates.

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