AMD Partners to Accelerate Glass Substrate Adoption

Currently, many enterprises are turning their attention to the glass substrate market, with SKC, Samsung, LG, and other companies engaging in fierce competition. Compared to traditional organic substrates, glass substrates boast superior physical and optical properties, overcoming the limitations of organic materials and offering significant advantages. These include exceptional flatness, improved photolithography focus, and remarkable dimensional stability in next-generation system-in-package (SiP) interconnections involving multiple small chips.

According to a report by Business Korea, AMD is accelerating the adoption of glass substrates, collaborating with a “global components company,” and planning to introduce them between 2025 and 2026 for high-performance SiP to maintain its leading position. AMD aims to target data center products for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, given the virtually limitless performance requirements of these applications.

Currently, AMD uses up to 13 chips in its EPYC series server processors, and the Instinct series AI accelerators employ as many as 22 chips. A more extreme example is Intel’s Ponte Vecchio, which contains 63 chips in a single package. Intel recognized the potential of glass substrates early on and formed an internal team to develop next-generation glass substrates for advanced packaging. They have spent nearly a decade on this endeavor, aiming to commercialize these substrates by 2030.

Glass substrates enable AMD to create more intricate designs without relying on expensive internal components, potentially reducing overall production costs and facilitating the development of higher-density, high-performance chip packages for data-intensive workloads like AI. Additionally, glass substrates offer better thermal and mechanical stability, making them more suitable for the high-temperature, durable application environments demanded by data centers.