Today, the ongoing chip shortage has caused large fluctuations in component costs, sometimes even within 24 hours. These shortages have also triggered a large number of fake components known as the "gray market."
Since Intel is one of the world's top chip manufacturers, the company has been working behind the scenes to speed up the manufacturing process and revitalize the entire semiconductor supply chain. This week, we learned that Intel is alleviating supply chain shortages by leveraging new initiatives to ABF substrates.
In this article, we will discuss the impact of ABF substrates on the supply chain and how Intel's Vietnam plan is designed to solve market challenges.
What is ABF substrate?
ABF carrier board is actually a type of IC carrier board, mainly used for high-computing performance ICs such as CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC. With the advent of the 5G era, network chip manufacturers have also begun to adopt ABF carrier board materials on a large scale for the production of routers, base stations, etc. It can be said that demand for ABF carrier boards is soaring.
Today, semiconductor-based processing units have become very complex and highly integrated in order to shrink to nanoprocesses. While this integration is an important boon for performance, it also complicates the details of the interconnect. It is more common to interconnect electronic devices with circuit boards and system levels on the millimeter scale rather than the nanometer scale.
To achieve this interconnection, almost all major semiconductor manufacturers use ABF. ABF acts as a bed in a device package, consisting of multi-layered microcircuits that interface between a PCB and a nanoscale CPU.
ABF Connection IC and PCB
This design provides insulation for processing units with thermosetting films. The film also has important characteristics such as high durability and low thermal expansion.
ABF New Challenge
One of the main challenges that plague the semiconductor industry is the severe shortage of ABF substrates. According to Intel, another challenge in making ABF substrates is that these films are very dispersed.
For example, a key element of an ABF substrate is a capacitor, which is mainly used to decouple and occupy both sides of the substrate. However, Intel has traditionally connected capacitors to only one side of the substrate, and relying on external vendors to connect them to the other.
Lower-level view view package ABF
The result of this dispersed manufacturing is to shorten the time to market and improve productivity.
Intel's ABF program
Now, with the imminent ABF shortage looming, Intel's goal is to make up for it by increasing the productivity of its existing ABF manufacturing processes.
For this reason, Intel announced that its Vietnam Assembly and Test (VNAT) plant will now connect capacitors internally to both sides of the ABF substrate. This change will allow Intel to effectively eliminate dependence on external suppliers during the ABF manufacturing process. According to Intel, the result is to be able to increase the speed of completing chip assembly by 80%.
Intel reduces the burden of ABF suppliers' needs by adding capacitors on both sides of ABF. By doing so, Intel wants not only to increase its manufacturing productivity, but also to help alleviate supply chain problems by allowing ABF manufacturers to focus on increasing supply.
* Statement: This article was created by the original author. The content of the article is his personal opinion. Our reprint is for sharing and discussion only and does not mean that we agree or agree. If you have any objections, please contact the backend.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-