Hybrid bonding heats up as Canon and LG take on established players

A host of equipment manufacturers are preparing to enter the hybrid-bonding (HB) market. Pioneer and market leader Besi underscored the driving force behind this trend at Semi’s 3D & Systems Summit in Dresden last June. There, Jonathan Abdilla, the company’s technical marketing director, showed that the packaging market for chips in mature nodes is growing more slowly and will even shrink in a few years. Machine builders are eager to increase their margins and are now targeting advanced packaging.

“If AI weren’t part of the equation, we’d already see a decline in the coming years,” Abdilla said in Dresden. It’s the AI boom with all its variables that will help Besi surpass the 1-billion-dollar revenue mark in the coming year with advanced packaging solutions that, besides HB, will also comprise thermocompression bonding (TCB). In AI systems, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks with pitches less than 9 microns will need HB, but especially in AI hardware, there’s also an upcoming need for co-packaged optics to enable communication needs and decrease the energy consumption of data centers.