Has Samsung secured an advanced packaging deal with Nvidia?
Online reports say Samsung has sealed an advanced packaging order for NVIDIA’s AI processors.
According to South Korea's TheElec, the Samsung Advanced Package (AVP) team is set to provide 2.5D packaging technology for the US AI firm. This is tech that enables the horizontal integration of chips like CPUs, GPUs, and HBMs on an interposer. Advanced AI processors all use it.
Samsung calls its 2.5D packaging technology I-Cube, and it competes with TSMC's own 2.5D packaging CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) tech. If the TheElec story is verified, it will be a vindication of Samsung's recent strategy to throw resources (in terms of investment and personnel) at its advanced packaging interposer technology. Last year, Samsung acquired 16 sets of packaging equipment from the Japanese company Shinkawa.
Should Samsung win the Nvidia business it will do so at the expense of TSMC and fuel speculation that TSMC is struggling to produce its CoWoS supply at sufficient volume.
