Apple reportedly becomes TSMC's largest SoIC semiconductor packaging customer after AMD, and will be used in Macs as early as 2025

On July 4, according to the Economic Daily, after AMD, Apple has expanded its cooperation with TSMC on SoIC packaging solutions and is expected to use the technology in 2025.

While TSMC is actively increasing CoWoS packaging capacity, it is also actively promoting the production of next-generation SoIC packaging solutions.

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

TSMC has currently integrated packaging processes to build a 3D Fabric system, which is divided into three parts:

3D stacking technology SoIC series

Advanced Packaging CoWoS Series

InFo Series

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

TSMC's SoIC has not encountered any major bottlenecks at this stage. It is in the front-end packaging stage and has started small-scale production in 2022. It also plans to expand its production capacity by more than 20 times by 2026.

Apple is also very interested in SoIC packaging and will adopt SoIC combined with Hybrid molding (thermoplastic carbon fiber board composite molding technology). It is currently in small-scale trial production and is expected to be mass-produced in 2025~2026. It is planned to be used on Mac.

The differences between CoWoS and SoIC are briefly introduced as follows:

CoWoS

CoWoS (Chip On Wafer On Substrate) is a 2.5D integrated production technology that is a combination of CoW and oS: the chip is first connected to the silicon wafer through the Chip on Wafer (CoW) packaging process, and then the CoW chip is connected to the substrate to integrate into CoWoS.

SoIC

SoIC was unveiled in April 2018. It is a new generation of innovative packaging technology developed by TSMC based on CoWoS and multi-wafer stacking (WoW) packaging technology. This marks that TSMC has the ability to directly produce 3D ICs for customers.