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The electrical engineer and UCLA professor Subramanian Iyer has been busy for decades developing chip packaging technology – a crucial technology in the international race of artificial intelligence (AI).
With increasing capability of AI systems, companies such as Nvidia have a greater demand for large and advanced chips. With the decreasing ability to reduce the size of transistors, companies are utilizing advanced packaging to join different components of the chip to form a single and strong component.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which is the largest producer of chips in the world, also dominates the advanced chip packaging market. The U.S. reliance on Taiwan has increased due to this fact.The U.S. government attempted to boost domestic chip manufacturing via the CHIPS Act enacted in 2022, costing several billions of dollars. The project for a $1.1 billion advanced packaging research center in Arizona backed up by the Biden administration was canceled later due to the Trump administration. According to Iyer, this could increase the U.S. dependency on TSMC even more.
According to experts, packaging is nearly as significant as the fabrication of chips itself. Packaging is essential for chip operation, and it connects different chip components, allowing them to interact quicker.
Intel, Applied Materials, and Amkor Technologies are currently working on the development of advanced packaging within the USA. The latter is establishing a big packaging facility in Arizona with government support.Traditionally, America has delegated the task of chip packaging to Asian countries, which were deemed secondary to this job. At present, the USA is responsible for 3% of all chip packaging across the globe.
In order to link several chips, advanced packaging employs such techniques as silicon layers and special materials. With the help of the CoWoS technology developed by TSMC, AI chips can be packaged along with fast memories, and Nvidia uses it to create its AI processor.
At the moment, despite the presence of the company’s factories in Arizona, the company packages their products in Taiwan. Thus, it is possible to state that advanced packaging has turned into a big issue of the AI competition between countries.
