Applied Materials said on Thursday it will expand its strategic partnership with BESI (BE Semiconductor Industries). BESI will join Applied's EPIC Center, an R&D facility for its equipment and process technologies, as an innovation partner. The two companies will broaden cooperation to new interconnect structures and applications based on a joint development program launched in 2020, the company said.

The companies will jointly optimise process and assembly solutions used across the full flow of advanced packaging, from wafer-level hybrid bonding to panel-scale integration. The goal is to enable customers to use the jointly optimised results at an earlier stage, they said. To that end, BESI engineers will work with Applied's team at the EPIC Center.

The expanded cooperation focuses on next-generation 3D IC scaling and logic-memory integration for use in AI computing and memory structures. Planned R&D tasks include a new die-to-wafer hybrid bonding platform based at a Singapore CoE and scaling thermocompression bonding (TCB) and related process ecosystems. It also includes die-on-wafer, die-on-die and die-on-panel integration platforms, and photonics-based interconnect applications to support co-packaged optics (CPO) and AI system scaling.

Prabu Raja (프라부 라자), president of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials, said advanced packaging is no longer a back-end assembly step but a materials engineering task requiring the precision and cleanliness of front-end wafer manufacturing. By developing technology with BESI engineers in a front-end R&D environment such as the EPIC Center, the companies can treat it as a connected flow rather than fragmented individual processes, he said. He added that this will allow customers of both companies to use jointly optimised solutions earlier and further shorten the period from development to mass production.

Richard Blickman (리처드 블릭먼), BESI CEO and chairman of the board, said the CoE the companies have operated together in Singapore has become the foundation of BESI's hybrid bonding roadmap. Joining Applied's EPIC Center as an innovation partner is a natural next step, he said. He said BESI will continue advancing TCB scaling, die-on-panel integration and interconnect technologies that will underpin next-generation AI and photonics systems together with leading logic, memory and systems companies.