🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

MediaTek adds advanced packaging know-how as it expands in AI chips

• Douglas Yu became an adviser after helping develop Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s advanced packaging, including CoWoS (Chip on Wafer on Substrate), which combines several chip parts in one package 1.
• That experience matters because CoWoS is widely used in AI chips, including Nvidia chips 1.
• It also fits MediaTek’s plan to generate several billion dollars in revenue from AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips by 2027 1.
• Yu’s background matches the design limits facing AI systems. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co said future CoWoS system-in-package products could exceed 14 reticle sizes by 2029, which raises heat and cooling demands for larger packages 2.

Advanced packaging now shapes AI-system performance

• Across the chip industry, advanced packaging plays a larger role in performance and efficiency as gains from transistor-density scaling slow 2.
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s CoWoS roadmap says that by 2029, larger packages could support far more compute transistors and memory bandwidth than 2024 reference designs, with figures of 48x more compute transistors and 34x more bandwidth under its roadmap assumptions 2.
• That shift is changing competition in semiconductors.
• Chip companies now need to manage the physics of large multi-die systems, from heat to power delivery to signal integrity, the reliability of electrical signals moving through the system 3.