Source: Global Semiconductor Watch

When major semiconductor manufacturers attack AI business opportunities, chip production capacity has not kept up with demand. Industry experts believe that the reason why high-end chip production capacity is not expanding fast enough is that various manufacturers use different sealed test technologies, and call on the industry to unify standards as soon as possible.

Jim Hamajima, president of the Japan office of SEMI, an international semiconductor industry group, said the chip industry needs more international standards for back-end or late-stage production processes to allow companies such as Intel and TSMC to increase capacity more efficiently.

At present, semiconductor companies such as TSMC and Intel are trying unique solutions in the back-end process, but they all use different standards, which is not very efficient.

Jim Hamajima said the back-end process, which includes chip packaging and testing, is more "fragmented" than the early stages of chip manufacturing, such as photolithography, which extensively uses standards set by SEMI. He believes this could affect the industry's profit levels as companies pursue more powerful chips.

The semiconductor process is divided into front-end and back-end two parts, the front-end process of the micro film technology is currently widely adopted by SEMI international standards, but packaging and testing back-end process is different from industry, such as TSMC advanced packaging using CoWoS technology, Samsung Electronics advanced packaging using I-Cube technology.

Chip packaging is especially important for achieving breakthroughs in chip technology because the traditional approach - squeezing more transistors onto a single chip - is facing technical limitations. This has spurred substantial investment in research and development and commercial capacity. For example, TSMC's CoWoS packaging technology is considered key to cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chips, and the company recently said it is working to rapidly increase production capacity to meet demand.

In fact, in recent years, semiconductor manufacturers actively invest in the research and development of advanced packaging technology, mainly because the front-end process is facing technical bottlenecks, so that the back-end process has become the decisive key in the eyes of the industry.

Jim Hamajima noted that semiconductor manufacturers who can adopt standardized automated production technologies and material specifications will have easier access to manufacturing equipment and upstream material supplies as they expand capacity.