AMD Plans Glass Substrate Tech by 2025-2026

According to a recent report by Business Korea, AMD is set to adopt glass substrates for its ultra-high-performance system-in-package (SiP) solutions between 2025 and 2026. This initiative will be conducted in collaboration with a leading global components company.

Glass substrates offer significant advantages over traditional organic substrates, prompting companies like Intel, Samsung, and others to compete in adopting this technology by 2025-2030. The superior flatness of glass substrates enhances lithography depth of focus and dimensional stability, making them ideal for advanced SiP interconnects involving multiple chiplets. Additionally, glass substrates boast excellent thermal and mechanical strength, making them suitable for high-temperature and durable applications, such as those required in data centers. These benefits make glass substrates particularly advantageous for high-performance computing companies like AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA.

For AI and HPC workloads, the performance demands of data center products and AI applications are nearly limitless. As such, processors for these workloads need to continually adopt the latest technologies to achieve maximum performance gains.

Advanced process technologies are also becoming more expensive and complex, with diminishing transistor density improvements. From a yield perspective, creating several smaller chiplets and placing them on an interposer or substrate is more cost-effective than building large monolithic chips. Furthermore, adding more chiplets can deliver greater performance enhancements than solely relying on new process nodes.

AMD has already developed SiPs with 13 chiplets (EPYC 9004 series) and even 22 chips (Instinct MI300A: 3 Zen 4 CCDs + 6 CDNA 3 compute chips + 4 I/O chips with Infinity Cache + 8 HBM3 stacks + 1 2.5D interposer). As future products become more complex, AMD is likely to adopt glass substrates early, given their numerous advantages.

Intel aims to mass-produce glass substrate technology by 2026. Samsung plans to complete prototype technology for glass substrates next year, with mass production starting in 2026. LG Innotek is forming relevant departments to enter the glass substrate market, and SKC, a chemical materials company under South Korea's SK Group, recently announced that its glass substrate manufacturing subsidiary Absolics has completed a factory in Covington, Georgia, USA, and has begun mass production of prototype products.