Besi holds the best cards in advanced packaging, but the game has only just begun

Expectations for hybrid bonding are high, and Richard Blickman, CEO of BE Semiconductor Industries (Besi), likes to drive the enthusiasm. “Hybrid bonding, that’s what you all came for,” he said when welcoming investors and analysts at Besi’s Capital Markets Day last June. The new interconnection technology should provide a new growth spurt for the Netherlands-based company in the coming years.

In technical terms, die-to-wafer hybrid bonding is a fascinating process. It precisely layers a bare, clean and very flat chip onto a wafer that has undergone the same beauty treatment. The surfaces must be clean at virtually atomic level, and then there’s the crucial operation of precisely mirroring and bonding the insulating silicon oxide and copper contacts. In a super-clean environment and with the right mechanical-chemical treatments, this creates a sandwich of integrated circuits with thermal and mechanical properties very similar to a monolithic chip.