To meet the demand for higher computing power, Intel takes the lead in launching glass substrates for next-generation advanced packaging

Glass substrates help overcome the limitations of organic materials, enabling orders of magnitude improvements in design rules required for future data center and artificial intelligence products.

Intel announced that it is the first in the industry to launch glass substrates for next-generation advanced packaging, which it plans to provide to the market in the second half of the 2020s. This breakthrough will enable the number of transistors in a single package to continue to increase, continue to promote Moore's Law, and meet the computing power requirements of data-centric applications.

“After a decade of research, Intel has led the industry in achieving glass substrates for advanced packaging,” said Babak Sabi, Intel senior vice president and general manager of assembly and test technology development . “We look forward to delivering advanced technology that will benefit our key partners and foundry customers for decades to come.”

The ball grid array side of an assembled Intel glass substrate test chip

Compared with the currently used organic substrates, glass has unique properties, such as ultra-low flatness, better thermal stability and mechanical stability, which can greatly increase the interconnection density on the substrate. These advantages will enable chip architects to create high-density, high-performance chip packages for data-intensive workloads such as AI. Intel is expected to provide a complete glass substrate solution to the market in the second half of the 2020s, allowing the entire industry to continue to advance Moore's Law after 2030.

By the late 2020s, the semiconductor industry’s ability to shrink transistors in silicon packages using organic materials may reach a limit due to the greater power consumption and limitations such as shrinkage and warping. Transistor shrinking is critical to the advancement and development of the semiconductor industry, so adopting glass substrates is a viable and necessary step toward the next generation of semiconductors.

Multi die assembly side of assembled Intel glass substrate test chip

As the demand for more powerful computing power continues to grow and the semiconductor industry enters the heterogeneous era of integrating multiple cores in a package, improvements in packaging substrates in terms of signal transmission speed, power supply, design rules, and stability become critical. Compared with the organic substrates currently used, glass substrates have superior mechanical, physical, and optical properties, which can connect more transistors in a package, provide higher quality miniaturization, and support the construction of larger chipsets (i.e., "system-level packaging"). Chip architects will have the ability to package more core modules in a smaller size in a single package, while achieving performance and density improvements in a more flexible, lower overall cost, and lower power consumption manner.

Glass Substrate Test Unit

In terms of usage, glass substrates will first be used where they can better play their advantages, namely applications and workloads that require larger packaging and faster computing speeds, including data centers, AI, graphics computing, etc.

Glass substrates can withstand higher temperatures, reduce pattern distortion by 50%, and have extremely low flatness, which can improve the depth of focus of lithography and achieve the dimensional stability required for extremely tight interlayer interconnect stacking. Due to these unique properties, the interconnect density on glass substrates is expected to increase by 10 times. In addition, the improvement of glass mechanical properties has achieved very high yield of ultra-large size packaging.

The glass substrate's tolerance to higher temperatures also gives chip architects more flexibility in setting power delivery and signal routing design rules, because it provides the ability to seamlessly integrate optical interconnects and embed inductors and capacitors into glass in a higher temperature workflow. Therefore, the use of glass substrates can achieve better power transmission solutions while achieving the required high-speed signal transmission at lower power consumption, helping the entire industry get closer to the goal of integrating 1 trillion transistors in a single package by 2030.

Glass core substrate for testing

This technological breakthrough stems from Intel's more than ten years of continuous research and evaluation on the reliability of glass substrates as an alternative to organic substrates. Intel has a long history of achieving technological innovation for next-generation packaging. In the 1990s, it led the industry's transition from ceramic packaging to organic packaging, pioneered halogen-free and lead-free packaging, and invented advanced embedded chip packaging technology and industry-leading active 3D packaging technology. As a result, Intel has been able to build a complete ecosystem around these technologies, from equipment, chemical and material suppliers to substrate manufacturers.

Intel is the first in the industry to launch glass substrates for advanced packaging, continuing the momentum of recent technological breakthroughs such as PowerVia and RibbonFET, and demonstrating Intel's advance attention and vision for the next era of computing after Intel's 18A process node. Intel is moving towards its goal of integrating 1 trillion transistors on a single package by 2030, and continued innovation in advanced packaging technologies, including glass substrates, will help achieve this goal.