These new capabilities will be made possible through the five-year DOD contract recently awarded to Osceola County and SkyWater Florida, which is expected to fund the facilitisation, tooling and build-out of the Center for Neovation.
With a valuation of over $120m over five years, the award includes options for an additional $70m, for a total value of up to $190m. SkyWater is the first domestic licensee of Deca’s M-Series and Adaptive Patterning solutions to support the reshoring of the semiconductor supply chain.
The first generation of Deca’s M-Series FOWLP is broadly adopted across multiple device technology nodes in leading smartphones and its Gen 2 M-Series delivers a new heterogenous integration solution for designers and manufacturers by streamlining the design and assembly processes and providing additional flexibility for multi-chip architectures with sub 20µm pitch.
The Gen 2 M-series provides significant advantages for several applications such as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, giving system architects ‘limitless’ potential through reticle-free maskless digital lithography and the flexibility of a moulded interposer layer.
Through SkyWater’s collaboration with Deca, embedded devices including active and passive bridge die, integrated passives and a powerful technology roadmap are planned. SkyWater will implement Deca’s Adaptive Patterning, the industry’s only real-time design-during-manufacturing capability, allowing designers to scale to unprecedented device interface density with wider process windows for robust manufacturability.
The award is part of the DOD’s Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD’s) Re-shore Ecosystem for Secure Heterogeneous Advanced Packaged Electronics (RESHAPE) efforts, and directly supports the US Administration’s initiatives to strengthen America’s supply chains.
This initiative is significant as less than 3% of semiconductor advanced packaging manufacturing takes place in the US, posing national security and economic risks for domestic businesses as chips go overseas for this critical step.
SkyWater said that it plans to stand up advanced packaging capabilities and capacity for low-volume/high-mix production of secure 2.5 and 3D Advanced System Integration and Packaging (ASIP) solutions.
In order to onshore these advanced packaging capabilities, SkyWater will be acquiring, installing, and qualifying new equipment at its Florida facility that can support FOWLP processing of incoming 200mm and 300mm device wafer formats. This dual-wafer size equipment capability provides the flexibility to support a vast array of customers and applications.
