On October 11th, Amkor announced the official opening of its chip factory located in the Yen Phong 2C Industrial Park in Hokkien Province, Vietnam. The new factory will become Amkor's largest, covering 57 acres and investing $1.6 billion (approximately RMB 11.682 billion) by 2035, mainly providing advanced system level packaging and testing solutions to meet the semiconductor industry's demand for advanced packaging. But currently, the company has not disclosed the production capacity and testing capabilities of the new factory.

Multi party attack on CoWoS

The artificial intelligence (AI) craze continues to drive demand for CoWoS production capacity, benefiting TSMC, which holds the majority of CoWoS production capacity orders.

However, Riyuehuang Investment Control, Ankang, Liandian, and others will also package and manufacture the card holder CoWoS. The industry believes that TSMC's CoWoS production capacity will be in short supply in the coming quarters, so some of the demand for production capacity is expected to shift to the Anqin factory.

Currently, the globally popular Nvidia artificial intelligence chips are integrated using 2.5D packaging technology, which is being handled by TSMC. Recently, NVIDIA revealed that new products such as the AI chip GH200 and the general server chip L40S were about to be mass-produced. It was rumored in the market that the L40S does not require 2.5D packaging and will be divided into later stage packaging orders by SunMoon Group, its subsidiaries Silicon Products, and AnReliance.

According to TrendForce, as AI demand continues to be strong, NVIDIA is expected to evaluate other similar advanced packaging foreign aid, such as Android or Samsung, for CoWoS related processes in response to potential supply shortages.

And Ankai has announced plans to expand the advanced packaging capacity of CoWoS like products. According to media quotes from the testing industry, at the beginning of 2023, Anxin's monthly production capacity of 2.5D advanced packaging was about 3000 pieces. It is expected to increase to 5000 pieces by the end of 2023 and the first half of 2024, and strive for a multiple growth level of 7000 pieces by the end of 2024.

SunMoon Investment Control stated that it has service projects in the field of advanced packaging CoWoS. In addition, Economic Daily, a Taiwan, China based media, reported that with the recent shortage of CoWoS production capacity, SunMoon Semiconductor, a subsidiary of SunMoon Investment Holding, was selected by major chip manufacturers to undertake the OS business after CoW because of its fan out FOCoS Bridge packaging technology.

Meanwhile, according to a report by South Korean media Etnews in mid September, Samsung will launch FO-PLP's 2.5D advanced packaging technology to attract customers in order to catch up with TSMC's advanced packaging artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The Samsung DS Advanced Packaging (AVP) team has started developing FO-PLP advanced packaging for 2.5D chip packaging, which can integrate SoC and HBM into silicon intermediate layers to form a complete chip.

It is worth mentioning that Samsung FO-PLP 2.5D is packaged on a square substrate, while TSMC CoWoS 2.5D is a circular substrate. Samsung FO-PLP 2.5D does not have edge substrate loss issues and has high productivity. However, due to the need to transplant chips from wafers to square substrates, the operating procedure is more complex.

Strong demand for CoWoS will continue

CoWoS is a 2.5D, 3D packaging technology that stacks chips and packages them onto a substrate, ultimately forming a 2.5D, 3D shape that reduces chip space while also reducing power consumption and cost. CoWoS packaging technology is applied in fields such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, data centers, 5G, the Internet of Things, and automotive electronics.

TrendForce consulting research shows that the demand for advanced packaging technology is increasing for chips such as AI and HPC, among which TSMC's CoWoS is currently the main adopter of AI server chips. CoWoS packaging technology is mainly divided into two stages: CoW and oS. Among them, CoW mainly integrates various Logic ICs (such as CPU, GPU, AISC, etc.) and HBM memory. In addition, the oS part connects the aforementioned CoW with solder bumps and other components, encapsulates them on the substrate, and finally integrates them into PCBA, becoming the main computing unit of the server motherboard, and other components such as network, storage The power supply unit (PSU) and other I/O components form a complete AI server system.

TrendForce Consulting observes that with strong demand for high-end AI chips and HBM, TSMC is expected to have a monthly CoWoS production capacity of 12K by the end of 2023. Among them, NVIDIA, driven by the demand for AI servers such as A100 and H100, estimates that the demand for CoWoS production capacity has increased by nearly 50% compared to the beginning of the year. Coupled with the growth in demand for high-end AI chips such as AMD and Google, it will make CoWoS production capacity more urgent in the second half of the year, and this strong demand will continue until 2024, It is estimated that with the availability of relevant equipment, the advanced packaging capacity will grow by another 30-40%.