GoKawiilKey Takeaways:
Packaging is now a performance variable. Substrate, bonding, and process sequence determine what can be built at scale.
Warpage underlies most advanced packaging failures and gets harder to control as package sizes grow.
Every proposed solution, such as glass, panel processing, and backside power, solves one problem while creating another.
Moore’s Law has shifted toward advanced packaging over the past few years, but the limits of that approach are just now coming into focus.
AI and HPC designs are growing larger and more complex, pushing the next barriers toward package mechanics and process control rather than interconnect density alone. Warpage, glass fragility, hybrid-bond yield, temporary bonding variation, and substrate limitations are becoming increasingly difficult to manage as structures get thinner, larger, and more heterogeneous.
These issues were a recurring theme at this year’s iMAPS conference, and have cropped up in recent interviews, all pointing to the same conclusion — packaging is entering a phase in which mechanical and process-control problems are complicating continued scaling.
That matters because packaging now sits much closer to the center of system performance. It no longer makes sense to talk about the architecture of advanced AI systems as if the package were a passive shell wrapped around the real innovation. Power delivery, thermals, interconnect density, substrate behavior, and process sequence all affect what can be built and what can be manufactured economically.
“What really drives performance today is not really the number of flops, the teraflops, or the petaflops per GPU, but rather the system architecture and the system performance as a whole,” said Sandeep Razdan, director of the Advanced Technology Group at NVIDIA, during his keynote at iMAPS.
Once system architecture becomes the performance driver, packaging stops being a downstream implementation detail and becomes part of the performance equation. The substrate, the carrier, the bonding interface, the thermal path, and even the order in which process steps are performed all matter more.
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