Absolics paves its way with semiconductor packaging

Driving some 35 miles east of Atlanta, the capital city of Georgia, a road named SKC Drive comes into view. Just a few miles more, a massive swath of land appears, littered with dozens of forklifts and unfinished steel frame structures.

Absolics' glass substrate facility under construction in Covington, Georgia [SKC]

COVINGTON, Georgia - Driving some 56 kilometers (35 miles) east of Atlanta, the capital city of Georgia, a road named SKC Drive comes into view.

Just a few miles more, a massive swath of land appears, littered with dozens of forklifts and unfinished steel frame structures.

“We are building a factory that can make 4,000 glass substrates per month,” said Absolics CEO Oh Jun-rok. “Three years after the completion of the first plant, we will start constructing the second one right next to it which will have six times more capacity.”

With the semiconductor market crowded and cutthroat, the next battleground is packaging technology. And Oh believes his company's glass substrates can be the next game changer that can increase the performance and energy efficiency of chipsets.

Absolics is a semiconductor packaging provider 80.6 percent owned by SKC. The company invested $240 million in the 12,000-square-meter facility with the goal of starting mass production in the second half of 2024.

The construction is underway right next to SKC’s PET film plant in Covington, which has been operating since 1996. The Georgia state government named the road after SKC to commemorate the company's investment in the state.

Absolics CEO Oh Jun-rok speaks during a press conference on Jan. 9 in Covington, Georgia. [SKC]

Glass substrate is a thin layer of glass on which processing and memory chips can be mounted together to create the brains of a computing system. The material reduces the space required for a multi-chip package, allowing more chips to be packed into a device.

Measuring 40 centimeters in width and length, the glass substrate has a thickness of about 0.8 millimeters, one-fourth of conventional substrates. Absolics is the world’s first company to develop such a substrate.

“When a glass substrate is applied, the package thickness is cut in half and so is power consumption,” said Kim Sung-jin, chief technology officer at Absolics.

“It enables utmost performance with minimal power consumption for high-performance computing, as well as for high-speed communication applications,” Kim added.

Glass substrates developed by Absolics, a semiconductor packaging provider 80.6 percent owned by SKC. [SKC]

In general, semiconductors such as the central processing unit and graphics processing unit, and memory are packaged as one component on a substrate together with several multilayer ceramic capacitors before being connected to a printed circuit board.

Plastic substrates are widely used, but their uneven surface is problematic for high-performance semiconductor packaging involving repetitive miniaturization.

“Using our glass substrates raises the performance by some 40 percent compared to using the plastic,” Oh said. “This is feedback from our clients.”

Oh added that the company is considering expanding production capacity to 72,000 square meters by 2025, given that the semiconductor packaging market for high-performance computing is rapidly growing due to a surge in data throughput such as AI and data center servers.

Absolics CTO Kim Sung-jin explains about glass substrates during a media tour at the Georgia plant on Jan. 9. [SKC]

The semiconductor packaging market for high-performance computing, which was valued at $8 billion in 2022, is expected to grow at an annual rate of 13.4 percent to reach $15 billion in 2027.

SKC developed the technology in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology. CTO Kim helped develop this glass substrate technology through research conducted at Georgia Tech Packaging Research Center while he was a research professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department from 2012 to 2015.

The glass substrates were unveiled to the public for the first time at the CES 2023 earlier in the month in Las Vegas.

Visitors take a look at SKC’s glass substrates displayed at the CES 2023 in Las Vegas. [SKC]

BY SARAH CHEA [chea.sarah@joongang.co.kr]