Intel Bets on Glass Substrate: Not Easy to Bend, Suitable for Large-Size Packaged Chips

According to foreign media EE Times, Intel is developing glass chip substrates to solve the current problems of organic substrates for chip packaging. Pooya Tadayon, Intel's director of assembly and testing, said that glass is harder than organic materials and has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, unlike organic substrates, which expand and bend. These characteristics make the glass substrate have great advantages, which can reduce the pitch of connecting lines and is suitable for large-size packaging.

Tadayon mentioned that the use of glass materials can achieve some interesting features, improve the efficiency of chip power supply, and increase the connection bandwidth from 224 G to 448 G. With the development of manufacturing technology and the change of demand, glass substrates will gradually appear and coexist with organic substrates, rather than replace the latter. In terms of advanced packaging, Intel has transitioned from SoC (system-on-chip) to system-in-package wafer-level packaging, said Tom Rucker, vice president of technology development and president of sealed test development at

Intel. This shift is actively underway, with many products already using EMIB (Embedded Multi-Chip Interconnect Bridging) technology, and is now moving to 3D interconnects that support chip stacking, which allows for higher performance in the same area.

However, with the advent of larger packages, mechanical challenges have also arisen. Intel said that the substrate of large-size packages tends to tilt, which makes it difficult to assemble on the motherboard, so if there is more advanced packaging technology, it can help customers, and Intel will cooperate with circuit board assembly companies. According to

Intel, chips packaged on glass substrates are expected to be produced by the end of 2024 at the earliest, with the connection spacing gradually shortened in the future and 3D stacking supported. This packaging technology can also significantly improve the yield, because today's large data center GPU, accelerator, the use of small chip packaging technology, a substrate can package up to 50 chips, as long as there is a bad package, then the whole chip will be scrapped.