Once the hotbed of chip development and manufacturing, Japan has been surpassed by the likes of Taiwan, South Korea, and the US. In a move to bring it back to the forefront of semiconductors, a new consortium has been launched, comprising 27 different firms, that will focus entirely on developing a key component in the packaging of multi-chiplet mega-processors: interposers.
The consortium, called Joint3, is being led by electrochemicals business Resonac Corporation, and it's been joined by the likes of Hitachi, Synopsys, and Zuken to research, develop, and ultimately mass-manufacture the interposers used to hook the multiple chiplets housed in mega-processors together.
For example, Nvidia's enormous GPU in its GB200 uses TSMC’s CoWoS-L packaging system, which includes a so-called redistribution layer interposer, to fuse two GPU dies into a single one. Interposers aren't just for massive AI chips, though, as Intel's Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs also use one.
In fact, they were traditionally just used to wire up processor dies to the pins underneath. Just take a look at any delidded CPU and you'll see that there's no way you could fit hundreds of little pins under the die.
Interposers are becoming increasingly crucial for processor development because there are hard limits to how large a single chip die can be made. AMD, Intel, Nvidia, et al would all love to manufacture a GPU with a gazillion shader units, but you just can't make them that big. However, you can make lots of little dies and layer them together to make the required size.
This is what Joint3 wants to become big in, and to begin with, it's focusing on different ways of making square interposers. At the moment, the most common way of fabricating them is to take a circular silicon wafer and cut the necessary rectangles or squares out of it. If they can be made in that shape directly, it will cut down the manufacturing time and cost.
It's also conducting research into using organic materials, rather than silicon. Intel reckons that glass is better than organics, though there are rumours that it has dropped further research to save money.
While it's most likely that Joint3 is hoping to jump on the AI bandwagon and garner some of the billions of dollars spent making the superchips that power the likes of ChatGPT, interposers are used across the full scale of processors. Resonac is certainly betting big, as it's dedicated one of its plants (as shown at the top of the article) to house the prototype production line.
So you never know, in a few years, you could be using a CPU or GPU in your gaming PC that has a little sliver of homebrewed Japanese interposer, doing its job at keeping all the chiplets and tiles working in unison. If the Joint3 consortium is successful, it would be a partial return to the age where, if you wanted the best, cutting-edge processors, you set sail for Japan.
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