Apple Expands Cooperation with TSMC on SoIC Packaging, Expected to Use in 2025

TapTechNews July 4th news, according to the Economic Daily report, after AMD, Apple has expanded its cooperation with TSMC in the SoIC packaging solution and is expected to use this technology in 2025.

TSMC is actively increasing the capacity of the CoWoS packaging while also actively promoting the landing and commissioning of the next-generation SoIC packaging solution.

AMD is the first customer of TSMC's SoIC, and its MI300 accelerator card uses the SoIC+CoWoS packaging solution, which can heterogeneously integrate dies of different sizes, functions, and nodes, and is currently produced in the fifth packaging and testing plant AP6 located in Zhunan.

TSMC has currently integrated packaging processes to build the 3DFabric system, which is divided into three parts:

The SoIC series of 3D stacking technology

The advanced packaging CoWoS series

The InFo series

It is reported that the capacity of TSMC's CoWoS series is tight. In addition to expanding the capacity of its own factories, TSMC is also actively cooperating with other packaging and testing factories to increase capacity.

While TSMC's SoIC has not encountered too big a bottleneck at present, it is in the front-end packaging, and has already started small-scale production in 2022, and plans to expand the capacity by more than 20 times in 2026.

Apple is also very interested in the SoIC packaging and will adopt SoIC with Hybridmolding (thermoplastic carbon fiber board composite molding technology), which is currently in small-scale trial production and is expected to enter mass production in 2025-2026, and the plan is to apply it to the Mac.

TapTechNews briefly introduces the differences between CoWoS and SoIC as follows:

CoWoS

CoWoS (ChipOnWaferOnSubstrate) is a 2.5D integrated production technology, which comes from the combination of CoW and oS: first connect the chips to the silicon wafer through the ChiponWafer (CoW) packaging process, and then connect the CoW chips to the substrate (Substrate) to integrate into CoWoS.

SoIC

SoIC was publicly disclosed in April 2018. It is a new-generation innovative packaging technology developed by TSMC based on the CoWoS and multi-wafer stacking (WoW) packaging technologies, which indicates that TSMC has the ability to directly produce 3DIC for customers.