There was a lot to be enthusiastic about at IMAPS Device Packaging 2025 (DPC2025). We presented the 2025 3D InCites Awards to eight deserving winners. We donated $70K to the IMAPS Microelectronics Foundation to establish a college fund for women and under-represented minorities seeking a career in microelectronics.
Now in its 21st year, the conference has tripled in attendance, presentations, and exhibitor demand since it began in 2005, so it needed a new home: the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass in Phoenix, AZ. This year’s attendance hit a record 1056. That’s 294 more participants than the previous record set last year – a 39% increase!
The reason for the growth is clear: Advanced packaging’s star is rising so high, that even the front-end guys have taken notice. Why is that? Semiconductor assembly and test expert, Shaun Bowers, explained it to me this way:
“Advanced packaging’s meteoric rise in the value chain is because it solves today’s economic and integration issues that prevent a true SoC in the fab,” he said. Or more simply, packaging is now solving the problems that fabs can’t.
The news of advanced packaging’s powerful capabilities has reached the data center experts, who are now clamoring for it. Its importance also reached the upper echelons of the U.S. Congress, which earmarked $2.5B of CHIPS Act monies for advanced packaging initiatives back in 2022.
In his keynote, JB Baker of Scaleflux called for efficiency innovation in chips, and more and better innovation in packaging to support the estimated 10X petaflops of data needed to train AI models and scale-out data centers.
Hemanth Jagannathan of IBM Research, is one of those recent converts from the front end to advanced packaging. “Packaging is here to save the day for AI and computations of the future,” he said. He shared IBM’s work with chiplet modules, noting that chiplets are the lowest cost path to achieve the necessary trillion transistors.
Absolics’ keynoter, Sung Jin Kim, talked about the company’s work with glass-based substrates. Substrates are also on the U.S. reshoring agenda. “The U.S. recognized our value – supporting us with manufacturing incentives for the next five years.”
ASU’s Jason Conrad spoke at length about the recent “as much as $1M” award to ASU and Deca from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce for the SHEILD USA Initiative.
Where Were the CHIPS Act Folks at IMAPS Device Packaging 2025?
While presenters celebrated the growth and expansion of their respective organizations and cited the generous CHIPS Act funding as making it possible, recent news out of Washington suggests that this house of cards could come tumbling down with a stroke of the new U.S. president’s Sharpie.
Flashback to IMAPS DPC 2024 – the air was charged with excitement as the CHIPS for America Act rolled out. President Biden had just visited Intel in Arizona to celebrate an $8.5B funding award.
Throughout 2024, we shared the exciting news as award after award was announced. As recently as January 2025, NIST announced $1.4B in final awards to support the next generation of U.S. semiconductor advanced packaging.
Flash forward to this year, where representatives from CHIPS for America Act agencies – NIST, NATCAST, and the NAPMP – were conspicuously absent from the IMAPS DPC agenda.
The word behind the scenes is that DOD spending is frozen, so no travel is happening. A NIST meeting was reportedly canceled. And I noticed that Dan Berger, the NAPMP representative I interviewed for the podcast last year, recently announced his departure from NAPMP on LinkedIn.
When I asked Absolics’ Sung Jin Kim: Are you concerned that the current administration would freeze the distribution of these funds, he looked over his shoulder before answering. Then he said, “We’re a U.S. company and we have secured the funding. We’re still a U.S. company.” The implication was that only foreign companies are at risk of losing funding.
I asked ASU professor Chris Bailey a similar question about the funding the university is promised for SHIELD, the SWAP HUB initiative and other programs. Rather than answer, he explained how important all these programs are for bolstering the much-needed semiconductor workforce.
In fact, even off the record, nobody I asked could answer directly, because like me, they simply didn’t know. So, they move forward with cautious optimism.
There was a palpable undercurrent of uncertainty that all investment from microelectronics and semiconductor companies since the CHIPS for America Act was signed in 2022 hangs precariously in the balance.
What Does it Mean to be DOGE’d?
On Tuesday evening, I got a text from one of our members who was watching the U.S. president address the nation and congress for the first time. The text said: “Trump just said we should kill the CHIPS and Science Act.”
The next morning when I arrived in the exhibit hall, another colleague asked, “So, Françoise, do you think the CHIPS Act is going to be DOGE’d?”
He meant, will the CHIPS Act funding be part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s budget-gutting activities? So now “DOGE” is a verb. It’s not just about cutting the budget. It’s about doing in such way that it that it creates so much chaos, that nobody really understands what is happening. And it’s done without planning for the fallout – so it likely cannot be undone.
In his first speech to Congress this term, the current president of the United States said the CHIPS Act fund is “a bad deal; a horrible deal”. He says instead of incentivizing foreign companies, we should be putting high tariffs to force them to build here. He seems to think TSMC’s recent $100B investment proves that theory. However, the CHIPS and Science Act reportedly includes $39 billion in subsidies for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and related components, along with $75 billion in government lending authority, not just foreign entities.
If the objective of tariffs is to get companies to invest in the U.S., will cutting funding mean the government also won’t provide any company – foreign or domestic – incentives and funds to reshore chip manufacturing? Can he really renege on the promises set by Congress without congressional approval?
How can anyone in this industry move forward in the face of so much uncertainty? How can they proceed with expansion plans and investments without the funds they counted on? And what is the ripple effect on the suppliers if manufacturing expansion slows, and investment in workforce development doesn’t happen? Yep – we’ve been DOGE’d.
On the bright side, the roller coaster appears to be on the way back up. The CHIPS and Science Act is a bipartisan bill, and despite the president’s distaste for it, as of March 6, even congressional republicans reportedly are in no rush to dismantle it. So, we can breathe easy. At least for now.
