Manufacturing Challenges for Large Substrates

Adoption of advanced packaging methods, such as 2.5D and chiplet based MCM assembly, combined with higher speed I/O, increasing I/O counts, and increasing product complexity have resulted in significant growth to FCBGA substrate size and complexity, which has strained the industry FCBGA substrate supply the last few years. Significant application drivers for increasing substrate complexity have been high performance computing (HPC, including server CPUs and AI accelerators), 5G base stations, and high-end networking. Substrate complexity requirements have increased with higher layer counts, reduced chip and package interconnect pitch, finer substrate line and space wiring, increased stacked via counts, higher package I/O requirements, and custom requirements such as embedded bridge diei or passive components.