Smarter Systems through Heterogeneous Integration

The semiconductor industry has had several changes in market, products, and technology brought by disruptive technologies and Moore's Law plateauing. Applications such as autonomous driving, 6G, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. have had tremendous growth and brought new opportunities for innovation. This session will focus on the industry trends and market drivers that affect the industry moving forwards.

Over the last few decades, 3D technologies have always provided promise for future applications. We are now delivering on this promise. As the 3D ecosystem has tackled many of the key difficulties we are now seeing high-volume applications with increasing 3D technology content. This momentum is driving 3D technologies into the front-end processes to enable increasing integration densities at excellent yields. This session will discuss the progress and collaborations across the 3D ecosystem towards increasing contribution to sustaining the pace of Moore’s law.

Continued performance scaling is not only driven by classical device scaling, however 3D integration in various flavors plays a key role in meeting future performance gains. Agreement prevails on the intersection of 10µm pitch from solder based interconnects to solid-state hybrid bond interfaces. Besides wafer-to-wafer also die-to-wafer hybrid bonding is determining future system design and manufacturing flows. In this section, we discuss all relevant aspects of hybrid bonding from central preparation processes and materials to actual bonding equipment.

Nowadays, addressing the challenges and opportunities arising from heterogeneous integration requires dealing with all the aspects related to their design: from the architecture and programming models to hardware/software integration and orchestration to real-time and security requests. This session will address modern heterogeneous systems and their evolution.

Solder bump interconnects are still the main method to vertically transport signals from device to device in today's advanced 3D packaging. Hybrid bonding enjoys distinct advantages here at ultra-high densities or rather enables them in the first place, and is thus catching up with the increasing number of high-performance applications. Nevertheless, both today and in the future, there is still a need for alternative and new approaches to interconnects, which will be highlighted in this session. In addition to electrical interconnects, other physical interface concepts such as optical or microfluidic interfaces that allow for higher-order overall 3D systems are also of interest. As the session title already suggests, besides interconnect technologies, innovative process approaches for 3D integration at the package and chip level will also be offered a platform here.

The exponentially growing data traffic is becoming a serious concern and will soon account for over 10% of global electricity consumption. The rescue could be found in Photonics – the technology that uses light to carry information. Integrating photonics on the chip level will provide low-energy, high-speed data transmission throughout the internet, as well as within data centers. Photonics also enables sensing and vision applications in healthcare, autonomous driving, and smart farming. However, the increasingly complex photonic chips must be produced at a much lower cost to live up to these expectations.

Sustainability and the associated integration of environmental and social aspects into the industry are of crucial importance to ensure livable conditions for current and future generations. This session will focus on how the semiconductor industry, technology, and digitalization can be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and waste generation, and to improve waste disposal, water, and materials recycling, as well as social impacts. In this context, alignment with upcoming regulations, proper goal setting, and assessment of the achievements will affect our industry as it progresses.

In recent years, significant progress was realized for materials, processes, and equipment to support 3D assemblies for scaling well-established interconnect technologies like flip chips as well as to improve the manufacturing maturity of newer technologies like hybrid bonding or optical interconnects. This extends the implementation of 3D integration in a wider range of products. This session demonstrates examples of how 3D technologies enable new applications.