TSMC has reportedly secured four major clients for its latest SoIC packaging – AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Apple. The chip manufacturer is actively working on increasing its next-generation chip packaging (CoWoS) production capacity.
Apple will reportedly use SoIC with Hybrid molding (thermoplastic carbon fiber board composite molding technology). The company is currently conducting a small-scale trial production and will reportedly start mass production in 2025. The company is expected to use this next-generation packaging method in its next generation of AI-powered Apple Silicon or the M4 chip.
TSMC’s SoIC is the industry’s first high-density 3D chip stacking technology which enables heterogenous integration of chips with different sizes using Chip-on-Wafer packaging. This innovative packaging method was first introduced in 2018. Reportedly, the planned advanced packaging facility in Chiayi, Taiwan will not only include two CoWoS (Chip on Wafer on Substrate) plants but also an SoIC facility.
Notably, AMD is TSMC’s first customer to adopt SoIC technology. The company used this SoIC tech along with CoWoS on the Instinct MI300 AI accelerator chips, designed for data centers.
As per Mark Gurman, Apple has officially commenced the development of the M4 chip, which will likely debut with the next-generation MacBook Pro. As TrendForce noted, there’s a possibility that Apple will switch to a 2nm process node for the M4 chip.
Regarding the release of the next Apple Silicon, we can see nearly a one and a half year gap between each of the previous iterations. The Apple M1 was released back in November 2020, the M2 was released in June 2022, and the M3 chip was released towards the end of October (a bit earlier) last year. So we can expect Apple to release the M4 chip in the first half of next year.
Apple is testing the next-generation packaging solution
Apple will reportedly use SoIC with Hybrid molding (thermoplastic carbon fiber board composite molding technology). The company is currently conducting a small-scale trial production and will reportedly start mass production in 2025. The company is expected to use this next-generation packaging method in its next generation of AI-powered Apple Silicon or the M4 chip.
TSMC’s SoIC is the industry’s first high-density 3D chip stacking technology which enables heterogenous integration of chips with different sizes using Chip-on-Wafer packaging. This innovative packaging method was first introduced in 2018. Reportedly, the planned advanced packaging facility in Chiayi, Taiwan will not only include two CoWoS (Chip on Wafer on Substrate) plants but also an SoIC facility.
Notably, AMD is TSMC’s first customer to adopt SoIC technology. The company used this SoIC tech along with CoWoS on the Instinct MI300 AI accelerator chips, designed for data centers.
As per Mark Gurman, Apple has officially commenced the development of the M4 chip, which will likely debut with the next-generation MacBook Pro. As TrendForce noted, there’s a possibility that Apple will switch to a 2nm process node for the M4 chip.
Regarding the release of the next Apple Silicon, we can see nearly a one and a half year gap between each of the previous iterations. The Apple M1 was released back in November 2020, the M2 was released in June 2022, and the M3 chip was released towards the end of October (a bit earlier) last year. So we can expect Apple to release the M4 chip in the first half of next year.