Besi will join Applied Materials' $5 billion EPIC Center in Silicon Valley as an innovation partner, deepening a packaging collaboration that has already produced Kinex, the industry's first integrated die-to-wafer hybrid bonding system, according to Applied Materials.

THE ELEC reported on October 1 that engineers from the two companies will jointly develop full-flow advanced packaging solutions at the facility, spanning wafer-level packaging (WLP) and panel-level packaging (PLP). The EPIC Center — short for Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization — is designed to shorten the path from research to high-volume manufacturing for semiconductor technologies.

What will the partners actually build?

The work program covers a broad portfolio of integration technologies:

• New die-to-wafer (D2W) hybrid bonding equipment
• Expanded thermo-compression bonding (TCB) technology
• Die-on-wafer (DoW) process technology and equipment platforms
• Die-on-die (DoD) platforms that stack and bond dies vertically after singulation
• Die-on-panel (DoP) integrated platforms for packaging multiple chips on large square substrates such as glass
• Co-packaged optics (CPO) interconnect technology combining silicon photonics with electronic chips in a single package

The technical target is 3D integrated circuits for next-generation AI compute and memory architectures, including logic-memory integration. The partners also plan to build an ecosystem connecting front-end and back-end processes.

Why hybrid bonding matters now

D2W hybrid bonding directly joins dies to wafers using copper and dielectric materials. It eliminates the soldering step used in conventional TCB, where metal bumps or microbumps are melted to connect chips. The direct-bond approach raises signal transmission speeds and cuts power consumption — attributes that make it a key enabling technology for high-performance AI computing, where chip-to-chip and chip-to-package bandwidth demands keep climbing as AI infrastructure build-outs accelerate.

The strategic shift behind the partnership is that advanced packaging is no longer simple back-end assembly. Next-generation technologies such as hybrid bonding and PLP now demand materials engineering capability, precision and cleanliness comparable to front-end wafer manufacturing — Applied Materials' home turf, complemented by Besi's die placement, interconnect and assembly expertise.

A five-year-old collaboration scales up

The two companies first partnered in 2020, establishing a joint center at Applied Materials' Advanced Packaging Development Center in Singapore. That collaboration combined Applied Materials' etch, planarization, deposition, cleaning and precision metrology technologies with Besi's assembly competencies. The Kinex integrated D2W hybrid bonding system launched last year as the first commercial result.

Besi joins an EPIC Center roster of more than 10 companies and institutions, including Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, Micron Technology, TSMC and Broadcom. The center is in the final stages of preparation: R&D equipment is moving into its clean rooms, and an unveiling ceremony is scheduled for October 12.

With demand for high-density, high-bandwidth chip integration rising alongside AI datacenter investment, the EPIC Center partnership positions Applied Materials and Besi to move hybrid bonding, panel-level packaging and co-packaged optics from development into volume production faster than either company could alone.