The Zhitong Finance App learned that Cathay Pacific Haitong released a research report saying that Moore's Law has slowed down, and Chiplet and advanced packaging have become alternatives to further improve performance. CoWoS is currently the mainstream advanced packaging technology platform, but due to limited production capacity and increased demand for AI inference, EMIB is receiving external orders; as Capex continues to invest, the overall advanced packaging equipment supply chain will benefit in the future.
Cathay Pacific Haitong's main views are as follows:
Moore's Law has slowed down, and Chiplet and advanced packaging have become alternatives to further improve performance.
Moore's Law has driven transistor density leaps for a long time, but as R&D and manufacturing costs rise, cost scaling has ended, and traditional scaling models are facing bottlenecks. In order to balance performance, cost, and yield, the industry has begun to adopt the Chiplet architecture to split different functional modules and achieve heterogeneous integration through advanced packaging. As the number of chiplets, interconnection density, and system scale continue to increase, advanced packaging has evolved from a supporting process for chip manufacturing to a core platform for heterogeneous integration and system scaling.
The advanced packaging market is growing rapidly, and 2.5D/3D advanced packaging is the main source of future growth.
As total demand for HBM and logic chips grows and technology evolves, 2.5D/3D advanced packaging will usher in scale growth and internal technology evolution. CoWoS-S and the like will evolve to technologies such as CoWoS-L and EMIB, and the HBM layers will also shift from micro-bump connections to hybrid bonding, and new technologies such as 3D Die-to-Die and 3D CBA DRAM are expected to continue to contribute new increments to the advanced packaging market in the next few years.
TSMC CoWoS is still the mainstream solution, and Intel EMIB is receiving external orders against the backdrop of a shortage of production capacity.
TSMC's CowOS is the current mainstream technology platform for advanced packaging in the AI era. It meets the high-density system integration requirements of GPUs and HBM, and advances in technology as GPU performance requirements improve. At the same time, Intel's EMIB route relies on lower costs and larger area, and is becoming an advanced packaging solution for some ASIC manufacturers. Currently, EMIB has received orders from many external customers such as Google, and is expected to become an important supplementary solution to CoOS. Looking to the future, TSMC's CoPos technology is solving current heat dissipation and warpage problems by square the use of glass substrates, etc., thereby improving area utilization and reducing costs, and is expected to grow rapidly after 28 years of mass production.
Global semiconductor manufacturers have increased their investment in Capex, and Capex is leaning towards back-end packaging and testing equipment.
Judging from the equipment required for advanced packaging, in addition to leading giants benefiting significantly, middle and back road equipment manufacturers will also receive structural increases. 1) Bonding equipment suppliers, mainly ASMPT and Besi, will benefit from the increased penetration rate of hot press bonding and hybrid bonding. Hot press bonding is still the mainstream solution for HBM in the short term, and the long-term trend of hybrid bonding as high-end advanced packaging equipment will not change. The increase in demand for bonding equipment and the increase in equipment value will continue to drive bonding manufacturers to increase their performance.
2) Measurement/testing equipment suppliers, mainly KLA and Onto, have great opportunities. As the number of HBM layers increases, the inspection steps and accuracy requirements for single packages will also increase, and the market size of measurement testing equipment may grow nonlinearly.
3) Test equipment suppliers, mainly TER and Advantest, will also benefit from the increase in overall storage and logic testing requirements. In the future, with the upgrading of testing processes and the transformation of testing processes to refinement, leading test manufacturers may usher in more performance increases.
Risk warning: Downstream demand for AI falls short of expectations; risk of falling short of expected risk of new technology R&D and mass production progress falling short of expected risk; risk of extended core equipment delivery limiting capacity expansion; industry competition intensifies risk.