If you were one of the almost 2000 attendees at ECTC 2024, held May 28-31 2024, in Denver, Co, then you must be feeling very important right now; especially if you’re an advanced packaging engineer.
Whether you’re improving energy efficiency, increasing yield, delivering innovative process control solutions, designing next-generation advanced high-density substrates, perfecting hybrid bonding processes, or addressing some other critical industry challenge head-on, it seems you’ve chosen the most needed role in the semiconductor industry.
I’ve been known to say advanced packaging saves the world. But I need to amend that statement to say, that advanced packaging engineers, and those holding adjacent roles, are the real heroes. And there’s never been a more exciting time to work in this space.
What Did You Come to ECTC To Learn?
According to Michael Meyer, Program Chair of ECTC 2024 and engineering professor at the University of Waterloo, in Toronto CA, this year’s ECTC selection committee had the daunting task of selecting which 375 papers would be presented across 36 oral sessions and 5 oral interactive sessions at the conference. This was because they hit record numbers of submissions.
While it is always difficult to choose, Meyer said the result was the highest quality papers. Many of our members presented on numerous hot topics. EV Group topped the charts with a record of 10 paper presentations.
What were this year’s hottest topics? Once again, anything to do with hybrid bonding all but guaranteed a paper slot. Considered one of the key enablers of AI and high-performance computing, hybrid bonding still has many challenges yet to be addressed.
Opportunities in advanced metrology, thermal management for AI/ML, RF packaging, and substrate scaling challenges for chiplets, were other key technical topics that were so important they garnered Special Session status. Additionally, there were special sessions on industry-government co-investments; overcoming education and workforce development challenges; and a focus on emerging start-ups and material innovations in advanced packaging grounded out technology topics.
Solving the AI Energy Crisis
If you follow me on LinkedIn, you may have noticed I’ve been having an existential crisis about the energy requirements of AI data centers, and 3D InCites role in helping to promote this power-hungry technology. So I was excited to learn about the work keynote speaker, Keren Bergman, Ph.D. is leading to solve this crisis with silicon photonic and co-packaged optics (Figure 1).
Bergman spoke about the potential photonics has to address both energy efficiency and bandwidth issues in AI. She set the stage by talking about the unprecedented growth AI applications are experiencing in data centers at six orders of magnitude (that’s 10 X 6) in the last six years.
“Have you ever seen anything that grows by an order of magnitude per year? it’s beyond our imagination for technology to grow so quickly,” she said.
To illustrate her point, Bergman used the amount of energy used in New York City as a frame of reference. She said that on average NYC requires over 5500 megawatts of power per hour. This is also the amount of energy per AI training for LLaMA-3. In the summer that expands to 32000 megawatts – when NYC often experiences power outages. This is also the amount of energy for one single AI training for ChatGPT 4 (Figure 2).
“Energy is not something that scales very well, as we all know. And this was the front page news.” She said. “Global energy consumption of AI is beginning to really have an impact,”
While Bergman’s degrees are in Electrical Engineering, her team is exploring how integrated optical interconnects can improve power efficiency and reduce energy loss, so that data centers can operate more efficiently at the system level.
Bergman’s team is developing unique laser technologies for energy efficiency and the latest advancements in optical communication technologies, including full-wafer fabrication and wafer-scale probe technology.
She says she came to ECTC for the first time not only to deliver the keynote but to pick the brains of the advanced packaging engineers and issue a call to action to find solutions to the remaining challenges of co-packaged optics.
What’s Happening in Advanced Substates?
Another ongoing narrative at ECTC was the increasing need for advanced substrate solutions, glass or otherwise. Essentially, the 2.5D, 3D and chiplet designs needed for advanced AI and HPC applications drive advancements in organic and glass core substrates (Figure 3).
Intel Foundry’s Gang Duan predicts that while we’ll see a major shift from organic to glass core substrates later this decade, they will co-exist for different applications. It will take the industry a while to determine those.
“True potential of chiplet adoption will depend on advanced packaging platforms and high-density interconnects,” said Rozalia Beica, CTO of start-up LQDX – formerly known as Averatek, and incubated at Stanford.
Beica enlightened attendees about a novel liquid nano-ink that enables high-density interconnect by depositing atomic palladium on the nano-contours of substrates. It’s a wet process and very conformal, she said. Best of all, the material has a low cost of adoption and can be adopted into existing wet processing lines.
For a deeper dive into some of the papers presented at ECTC, hang in there for Phil Garrou’s annual review of selected papers.
Speaking of Start-ups…
Beica also spearheaded a new special session for startup companies with innovative materials technologies, co-chaired by Farhang Yazdani, of BroadPak. This shark-tank-like session featured five 10-minute pitches followed by rapid-fire questions from a Jury panel chaired by Jeff Perkins, Yole Group, and comprising Blair Georgakas, Applied Ventures; Min Zhou, CM Venture Capital; Martijn Pierik, Kiterocket; Simi Sherman, Navat Capital; Hidenori Abe. Resonac; and Jason Rouse, Taiyo America (Figure 3).
Contestants included Victor Chiriac, Global Cooling Technology Group (GCTG); Mohsen Asad, Hyperlume; Wayne Rickard, Terecircuits and Tristan and El Bouayadi, Thintronics.
Of all the technologies presented, the two I found most interesting were:
- GCTG’s ec0-friendly liquid cooling technology uses microchannels embedded in an ultra-thin cooling plate as a “micro-fridge” to keep processors cool and enable faster processing speeds.
- Terecircuits laser-based released technology replaces needle-based pick-and-place tool to pick-and-place ultra-thin die used in MicroLED applications. Teracircuits won the contest (Figure 3).
The event drew almost 700 attendees – only the plenary keynote topped attendance.
Stay Tuned for More from ECTC on the 3D InCites Podcast
Aside from the keynote and these two special sessions, I spent most of my time interviewing speakers and members for the 3D InCites podcast. Luckily, my guests all shared their expert opinions on key highlights of ECTC 2024. We’ll be dropping three new episodes over the next three weeks. So if you’re not already following, you can do so here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The first episode that drops on June 6 will feature an interview with Keren Bergman. Additionally, Chet Lenox, of 3D InCites member company, KLA, will share key takeaways from the Special Session on Challenges and Opportunities in Advanced Metrology for Next-gen Microelectronics.
The ECTC member spotlight episode featuring chats with ten of our community members drops on June 13. ASE’s Mark Gerber and Vikas Gupta kick it off with a deep dive deep into the details of PowerSiP, and how it addresses the power-hungry AI issues by improving power efficiency.
In my interview with LQDX CEO Simon McElrea, we talked about how the term “advanced packaging engineer” no longer describes the intricate challenges these people tackle. 12 years ago, we tried to get the term “interconnectologist” originally coined by Scott Jewler, into the lexicon. Here’s the story.
Now than ever, the idea of interconnectologists practicing interconnectology describes what the ECTC community so much better than advanced packaging. So we’re on a new mission to revive the concept. Whether you see yourself as an advanced packaging engineer or an interconnectologist, your time has come.
Our June 20th episode will feature a conversation with ECTC Leadership. General Chair Karlheinz Bock and Program Chair, Michael Mayer recap this year’s highlights and talk about the experience of serving on the ECTC committee over the years. ~ FvT
