TSMC recently won four high-profile customers for its latest SoIC packaging technology – AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom and Apple. As the semiconductor producer ramps up production capacity for CoWoS chip packaging technology.
Apple Explores Advanced Packaging Solutions
Apple is said to be exploring SoIC combined with Hybrid molding technology – which integrates thermoplastic carbon fiber board composite molding – for mass production by 2025. They currently are engaged in limited trial production phase but plan to ramp up mass production as early as 2019. They anticipate using this cutting-edge packaging approach with their forthcoming AI chip or M4 chip from Apple.
TSMC’s SoIC technology represents an innovative high-density 3D chip stacking method for accommodating chips with different sizes through Chip-on-Wafer packaging. First introduced in 2018, SoIC will soon become one of the key elements at an advanced packaging facility planned in Chiayi, Taiwan which will feature both CoWoS plants as well as its SoIC facility.
AMD Adopts SoIC Technology
AMD was the pioneering client to embrace SoIC technology with CoWoS for data center AI accelerator chips; their Instinct MI300 AI Accelerators utilized these methods.
Mark Gurman reports that Apple has officially begun development on an M4 chip destined to appear in their next-gen MacBook Pro laptops. TrendForce suggests Apple could switch over to 2nm process nodes with this chip design.
Historical patterns for Apple Silicon releases suggest roughly one and a half year intervals between each version, such as November 2020 for M1, June 2022 for M2 and late October for M3. Therefore it seems plausible that they would reveal M4 by first half of next year.
