Global semiconductor industry association SEMI plans to join forces with global partners in creating a new energy management platform in Taiwan to tackle power consumption and heat dissipation issues faced by artificial intelligence (AI) applications, SEMI international board chairman Tien Wu (吳田玉) said yesterday at a news conference promoting this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show.
The new platform would be SEMI’s third industry alliance in Taiwan. It created the chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) alliance two years ago and the silicon photonics industry alliance last year.
Taiwanese companies should continue investing selectively and strategically to capture next-wave industry growth opportunities amid a major shift in the value chain, in addition to overcoming short-term advanced technology capacity constraints amid the AI boom, Wu said.
Photo: CNA
They should invest in key areas such as factory automation, silicon photonics, and CoWoS and power management technologies in preparation for new AI applications and to leverage their current strength, he said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) vice president of integrated interconnect and packaging business C.K. Hsu (徐國晉) said that the advanced CoWoS packaging technology has become the most sought after technology by local semiconductor and equipment suppliers, while demand for silicon photonics technology would become robust, as the technology helps advance AI networking in data centers.
The most important values of silicon photonics technology are power efficiency, and the integration of bandwidth and signal, he added.
However, as power consumption grows along with increases in transistor count, how to efficiently transmit power to specific areas on a chip would become a structural bottleneck, Wu said, adding that Taiwan should work with global partners to tackle such issues.
Taiwan has been benefiting from the booming demand for AI applications, as it has built an extensive AI ecosystem from chip manufacturing, chip design to hardware manufacturing, Wu said.
That competitive position is expected remain in place for the next two to three years, he added.
At the news conference, GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓) chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said that the availability of key materials such as rare earths and rare specialty gases used in the semiconductor manufacturing process would become a new bottleneck.
That is on top of the availability of advanced 1-nanometer or 2-nanometer chip capacity or advanced chip packaging capacity, Hsu added.
“In addition to capacity and technology races, the next checkpoint should be the control of key materials in the future. Key materials will become crucial in enhancing supply resilience,” she said.
Hsu called on the government to play its part in bolstering key materials availability by encouraging local production.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
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