Taipei, Taiwan
Cnn
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In the biggest foreign investment in the history of the United States, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company unveiled an investment of $ 100 billion, attracting global attention and causing concerns to Taiwan.
TSMC, which produces more than 90% of global advanced semiconductive chips that feed everything, smartphones and artificial intelligence applications (IA) on arms, will create two new advanced packaging installations in Arizona, among others.
Here is everything you need to know about advanced packaging technology, which has experienced exponential growth in demand as well as the world frenzy of AI, and what it means for the fight between the United States and China for the domination of AI.
While the two countries have announced a temporary truce that has made the three-digit disruptive prices retreat for 90 days, the relationship remains tense due to the current quarrel on the restrictions of the flea imposed by the United States and other problems.
Last month at Computex, an annual fair in Taipei which was pushed under the spotlight because of the Boom of the AI, the CEO of the Nvidia flea manufacturer, Jensen Huang, told journalists that “the importance of advanced packaging for AI is very high”, proclaiming that “nobody has pushed advanced packaging stronger than me”.
The packaging generally refers to one of the semiconductor flea manufacturing processes, which means sealing a chip in a protective case and mounting it in the motherboard that goes to an electronic device.
Advanced packaging, in particular, refers to techniques that allow more chips – such as graphic processing units (GPU), central processing units (CPU) or high bandwidth (HBM) memory – to place closer, leading to better overall performance, faster data transmission and lower energy consumption.
Consider these chips as different departments within a company. The closer these departments come close to each other, the easier it is, and less time it takes, so that people move with each other and exchange ideas, the more effective the operation.
“You are trying to bring the chips together as much as possible, and you also put different solutions to make the link between the fleas very easy,” Dan Nystedt, vice-president of the private investment company based in Asia, told CNN.
In a way, the advanced packaging maintains Moore’s law, the idea that the number of transistors on the microchips would double every two years, because the breakthroughs in the manufacturing process of fleas will become more and more expensive and more difficult.
Although there are many types of advanced packaging technologies, Cowos, abbreviated for chips Sur-Wafer-sur-Subbstrat and invented by TSMC, is undoubtedly the best known that has been thrown under the projectors since the beginnings of the Openai Chatppt, which sparked the Frenzy.
It even became a familiar name in Taiwan, which prompted Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), to say that the island is the “only place where you can say Cowos and everyone would understand”.
Advanced packaging has become a big problem in the world of technology because it guarantees that AI applications, which require a lot of complex IT, run without delay or seeds.
Cowos is essential for the production of AI processors, such as GPUs produced by NVIDIA and AMD which are used in AI servers or data centers.
“You can call it the NVIDIA packaging process if you wish. Although anyone is using the Cowos process,” said NYSTEDT.
This is why demand for Cowos technology has soamed. As a result, TSMC rushes to accelerate production capacity.
During a visit to Taiwan in January, Huang told journalists that the amount of advanced packaging capacity currently available was “probably four times” what it was less than two years.
“Packaging technology is very important for the future of computer science,” he said. “We must now have very complicated advanced packaging to collect many chips in a giant chip.”
If advanced manufacturing is a piece of the puzzle in terms of flea manufacturing, the advanced packaging is another.
Analysts say that having the two pieces of this puzzle in Arizona means that the United States will have a “one-stop shop” for flea production and a reinforced position for its Arsenal AI, benefiting from Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm and Broadcom, some of the best TSMC customers.
“It guarantees that the United States has a complete supply chain of advanced manufacturing with advanced packaging, which would benefit the” competitiveness of IA fleas “, told CNN Eric Chen, analyst of the market company Digitimes Research.
Because advanced packaging technologies, the AI key is currently produced until Taiwan, having it in Arizona also reduces the potential risks of the supply chain.
“Instead of having all the eggs in a single basket, Cowos would be in Taiwan and also in the United States, which makes you feel more safe,” said Nystedt.
While Cowos has had its moment recently, the technology has actually existed for at least 15 years.
It is an original idea of an engineering team led by Chiang Shang-Yi, which served two stays at TSMC and retired from the company as co-responsible for the farm.
Chiang first proposed to develop technology in 2009 to try to integrate more transistors into fleas and solve the bottlenecks in performance.
But when it has been developed, few companies have taken up the technology due to the high cost associated with it.
“I had only one customer … I really became a joke (in the company), and there was so much pressure on me,” he recalls in an oral history project in 2022 recorded for the Museum of Computer Science in Mountain View, in California.
But AI boom has transformed cowos, making it one of the most popular technologies. “The result was beyond our initial expectations,” said Chiang.
In the global supply chain of semiconductors, companies that specialize in packaging and test services are called assembly and trial companies of externalized semiconductors.
In addition to TSMC, Samsung in South Korea and the Intels in America, as well as OSAT companies, including the Chinese JCET group, America’s AMKOR and the ASE Group of Taiwan and SPIL are all key players in advanced packaging technologies.
