EV Group, a leader in wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, will supply wafer bonding and lithography equipment to ITRI in Taiwan, and the two will collaborate on semiconductor development.

EVG announced today that it is expanding its collaboration with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), one of the world's leading applied technology research institutes located in Hsinchu, Taiwan, to develop advanced heterogeneous integration technologies.

With the support of the Department of Industrial Technology (DoIT) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) in Taiwan, ITRI established the Hi-CHIP (Heterogenous Integration Chip-let System Package) collaboration to contribute to achieving supply chain localization and expanding business opportunities by forming an ecosystem encompassing package design, testing and verification, and pilot production.

As a member of the Hi-CHIP Alliance, EVG offers advanced wafer bonding and lithography equipment, including the LITHOSCALE® maskless exposure lithography system, the EVG® 850 DB automated debonding system, and the GEMINI® FB hybrid bonding system.

With these high-volume production facilities installed in ITRI’s state-of-the-art research facility, EVG and ITRI’s joint customers will be able to rapidly develop new heterogeneous integration processes and quickly transfer them from R&D to customer fabs. It became possible.

In the semiconductor manufacturing realm, 3D vertical stacking and heterogeneous integration refer to the manufacturing, assembly, and packaging of multiple different components and dies into a single device or package, which is becoming increasingly important not only for the purpose of shrinking transistor sizes but also to continuously achieve higher performance.

3D and heterogeneous integration enable high-bandwidth interconnects in advanced packaging, which can improve overall system performance and play a critical role in artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous driving, and other high-performance computing applications.

For this reason, MOEA is actively supporting and connecting necessary resources through national-level R&D projects such as the ‘AI Chip Heterogeneous Integration Module Advanced Manufacturing Platform’ and ‘Programmable Heterogeneous 3D Integration.’

“ITRI’s mission is to foster industries, create economic value, and achieve social prosperity through technological development,” said Dr. Robert (Wei-Chung) Lo, Deputy Director of ITRI’s Electronics and Optoelectronic Systems Laboratory. “To that end, we focus on the development of advanced 3D and heterogeneous integration processes, and we seek to facilitate close collaboration across the supply chain to support the continued development and growth of the semiconductor industry. By installing EVG’s state-of-the-art wafer bonding and lithography solutions in our lab, which are the same as what our customers are installing in their own fabs, we can directly transfer the processes developed at ITRI to our customers’ fabs, significantly reducing their time to mass production.”