Witnessing Foundry 2.0 in Action By Françoise von Trapp One way I learned about
“Foundry 1.0 operates on the theory: You can get any color you want, as long as it’s black,” says Patti, as an analogy. At NHanced, you actually can get any color you want. And because NHanced doesn’t make transistors, it’s not competing with its customers. The company partners with all the leading-edge foundries to source its chips, then adds its magic to turn them into custom devices. Another key differentiator between Foundry 2.0 and Foundry 1.0 is reduced manufacturing cost. By using legacy tools and processes for the basics and reserving the leading edge for the “special sauce,” Patti says he can keep the cost down lower than what the tier-one foundries and IDMs can do. The timing couldn’t be better for NHanced and Foundry 2.0. The semiconductor industry is changing, driven by the needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and other high- performance computing applications. Rather than being volume-driven, it's now value-driven. “The profit margins for fabs and IDMs are taking a hit, and the end users like NVIDIA are seeing the profits. If we continue to rely exclusively on Foundry 1.0, the costs of semiconductor devices will continue to increase, and so will the cost of our end devices,” notes Patti. The Birthplace of Hybrid Bonding The facility in Morrisville, North Carolina, where I visited, is also the birthplace of hybrid bonding. It was invented in this building by Ziptronix (now Adeia) by Gill Fountain and Paul Enquist. Fountain still shares office space with the NHanced team. NHanced bought the building in 2017, along with a full technology transfer license from Adeia, and is now the first company to implement hybrid bonding in its processes for heterogeneous materials like silicon and glass, and silicon carbide. The cleanroom space is outfitted with mostly refurbished equipment; workhorses that excel in performing legacy node processes that are well suited to the feature sizes for the most advanced packaging processes (Figures 2, 3).
advanced packaging technology and what it entails is by visiting our community member companies. There's nothing like talking to the experts face- to-face and walking through a cleanroom or advanced packaging applications lab to drive home a concept. For the past year, I’ve been talking with Bob Patti, Founder
Figure 3: Carl Pettaway gave me a “window” tour of the North Carolina clean room. Here, were looking into the lithography bay of the class 100 cleanroom. But when a process calls for a new, leading-edge tool, Patti happily invests in it. For example, the company recently bought one of the first Besi Datacon 8800 CHA- MEO systems for room-temperature direct fusion and hybrid bonding processes. (Figure 4).
and CEO of NHanced Semiconductors, about the company’s growth and expansion in North Carolina and Indiana and the launch of a new business model he calls Foundry 2.0. Recently, Patti invited me to the Morrisville, North Carolina facility to get a first-hand look at Foundry 2.0 in action. Who is NHanced Semiconductors? Coming up on its 9th anniversary, NHanced
"Moore's law is dead, in terms of cost," Patti says. "We can continue scaling but it's expensive. Advanced packaging allows us to eliminate unused elements and reduce the transistor count, which directly reduces cost and power, and still meets or exceeds the needed performance." He’s talking about the processes and technologies that will enable next-generation chiplet architectures, as well as complex systems-in-package (SiP) for specialty applications. “All advanced packaging really boils down to is getting rid of the wire,” says Patti. What Is Foundry 2.0 and Why Do We Need It? Foundry 2.0 sources dies and chiplets from traditional foundries and applies semiconductor foundry processes and advanced packaging and assembly technologies. It uses front-end processes such as photolithography, chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), deep reactive ion etching (DRIE), and hybrid bonding processes. The results are highly interconnected 2.5D interposer assemblies, 3D stacked ICs, and chiplet configurations. What makes Foundry 2.0 different from Foundry 1.0? Patti explained that while traditional foundries and IDMs implement 2.5D and 3D advanced packaging for chiplet integration internally, they can't serve customers who want to tap into these technologies to integrate third- party chips—memory, for example—into the package. They also aren’t interested in customization or low- volume applications.
Semiconductors spun out of Tezzaron Semiconductor in 2016 to focus on the high-end advanced packaging technologies that Patti and his team of design and packaging engineers first developed at Tezzaron. The team pioneered layer transfer stacking for DRAM memory. Patti is a serial entrepreneur—having founded nine start- ups, including Tezzaron and NHanced. While he hails from chip design, he says his experience over the years has shaped him into an advanced packaging process engineer. He likes to say that NHanced specializes in leading-edge technology from 25 years ago. So what does he mean by that? It’s simple: the company implements 25-year-old fab technology that is leading-edge for advanced packaging today. Advanced packaging isn't done at the nanometer scale, he explains, so using advanced node processes and processing equipment for 2.5D interposer fabrication and 3D IC stacking is overkill (Figure 1).
Figure 4: The Besi Datacon 8800 CHAMEO ultra plus is an advanced room-temperature hybrid bonding system that addresses increased demands for performance, speed, accuracy, and warpage control in fine-pitch copper interconnects with submicron pad sizes. Patti says the company does virtually all the advanced packaging for the federal government that requires hybrid bonding. "The good news is we're drowning in business," says Patti. "For hybrid bonding, our facility will be able to produce larger volumes than TSMC by 2026." Expansion Plans for NHanced NHanced is 100% self-funded. There are no investors and no debt. And while NHanced was in the running for CHIPS Act funding, Patti believes they were passed over primarily because the model he proposed targeted lower-volume production rather than typical OSAT high- volume manufacturing. But this hasn’t stopped Patti’s plans for expansion. Up until now, NHanced has been primarily a development company but is now ramping up to become a volume manufacturer of high-mix devices. Patti anticipates that the company, which has seen 10x growth in the last two years, will see another 10x increase in revenue over the next five years.
Figure 2: This Class 1000 etch bay is outfitted with customized equip- ment, such as this dual chamber, silene based oxide deposition system.
Figure 1: This Class 1000 cleanroom is outfitted with 200mm CMP tools.
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