Samsung Electro-Mechanics to supply advanced substrates to AMD

FC-BGA. [Courtesy of Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co.]

Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEM) Co., an electronic component manufacturing company under South Korea’s Samsung Group, will supply high-specification semiconductor substrates for servers to U.S. chip designer Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).

The supply comes more than two years after Samsung Electro-Mechanics invested 1.9 trillion won ($1.37 billion) in the flip-chip ball grid array (FC-BGA) substrate.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics announced on Monday that it signed a contract with AMD to supply high-performance FC-BGA substrates for hyperscale data centers and began mass production.

The products will be manufactured at the company’s Busan plant in Korea and its new factory in Vietnam.

Hyperscale data centers are ultra-large data centers with a floor area of 22,500 square meters which operate at least 100,000 servers through high-speed networks.

Among them, FC-BGA is a high-density package substrate that connects the semiconductor chip and the main board using a flip chip bumping method without wires.

Semiconductor substrates must stack multiple semiconductor chips on a single substrate at once to enhance processing power and signal connection speed.

If package substrates for mobile devices are comparable to apartments, server substrates are akin to skyscrapers with expansive floors.

Consequently, server substrates are prone to warping, making yield management more challenging.

Server FC-BGA substrates are among the most technologically complex products, with only the top 10 percent of companies capable of producing advanced substrates.

In particular, data center substrates are ten times larger and have three times more layers than general computer substrates, requiring more efficient power supply and reliability among chips.

“We are pleased to be a strategic partner with AMD, a global leader in high-performance computing and AI semiconductor solutions,” said Kim Won-taek, executive vice president of the Strategic Marketing Center at Samsung Electro-Mechanics. “We will continue to invest in advanced substrate solutions to deliver core value to customers like AMD.”