According to industry sources, TSMC has outsourced part of the CoWoS packaging business process to OSATs such as ASE, Sipin, and Amkor, especially for small-volume customized products.

CoWoS (Chip On Wafer On Substrate) is a 2.5D packaging technology that first connects the chip to the silicon wafer through the Chip on Wafer (CoW) packaging process, and then connects the CoW chip to the substrate (On Substrate, referred to as oS).

According to the "Electronic Times" quoting the above-mentioned person, for some high-performance chips that require small batch production, TSMC only processes the CoW process at the wafer level, and outsources the oS process to OSATs. A similar cooperation model is expected to be used in the future 3D IC Continue to exist in the package.

The basis of this model is that TSMC has a highly automated wafer-level packaging technology, and the oS process cannot be automated relatively more parts, requiring more manpower, and OSAT has more experience in the oS process, which leads to TSMC chose to outsource this part of the process.

In fact, in the past 2-3 years, TSMC has successively outsourced some of the oS process of packaging business to the above companies, including silicon interposer integration or fan-out wafer level packaging (FOWLP), and the need to use CoWoS or InFO_oS Various HPC chips produced in small batches by the packaging process.

According to sources, for TSMC, in addition to advanced processes, the most profitable business is wafer-level SiP technology, such as CoW and WoW, followed by fan-out and interposer integration, and oS has the lowest profit. As the demand for heterogeneous chip integration will increase significantly, TSMC is expected to adopt a more flexible model to cooperate with OSATs.

The person emphasized that even if TSMC’s latest SoIC technology is widely used in the future, the cooperation between foundries and OSATs will continue, because SoIC, like CoWoS, will eventually produce "wafer format" chips that can integrate heterogeneous Or homogeneous chips.

According to the source, TSMC currently uses the substrate-free InFO_PoP technology to package iPhone APs manufactured with advanced process nodes. The powerful integrated manufacturing service helps to obtain a large number of orders from Apple.