China’s biggest foundry, SMIC, wants tighter ties with the testing crowd, hoping backend tricks can do what lithography won’t.
The company appears to have hit a wall on transistor scaling, so it is eyeing advanced packaging as if it were the last open bar in Loughborough.
China’s biggest chip manufacturer is looking to the same backend playbook that Nvidia and others have used to squeeze more performance out of modern silicon, well past the comfy old Moore’s Law story. Advanced packaging has become the industry’s favourite workaround, with scaling laws leaning less on smaller transistors and more on clever ways to stitch compute together behind the scenes.
A DigiTimes report claims SMIC is setting up a dedicated “research organisation in Shanghai” to develop key packaging technologies, with the aim of pushing beyond Moore’s Law. If the outift cannot reach the fanciest nodes, you try to make what you have look bigger and faster by stacking, bonding, and shuffling data at obscene bandwidth.
This is not SMIC’s first dabble. Earlier reports said it has a joint venture with JCET Group, but the current menu is mostly wafer bumping, wafer-level packaging, chip-scale packaging, conventional packages and testing, which is fine for yesterday’s phones and dull industrial boxes.
What it lacks is a proper 2.5D or 3D solution comparable to TSMC’s CoWoS or Chipzilla’s Foveros, and customers want high-bandwidth memory and tight chiplet integration. That matters if you are trying to keep pace in HPC while your front-end options are boxed in.
SMIC is not going to “spawn” a backend product overnight, because this stuff needs ultra-high-precision kit, high-end interposers and an ecosystem that does not appear by wishing hard. The report says the point of the Shanghai effort is to “strengthen coordination between wafer manufacturing and packaging and testing operations”, which reads like a plan to lean harder on external OSAT partners rather than pretending it can do everything in-house.
TSMC’s CoWoS capacity is still tight, and Chipzilla’s EMIB has been picking up work because the packaging gains are hard to ignore once you are chasing bandwidth and power efficiency. SMIC is late to the party, but it might still get its foot in the door.
