SemiAnalysis: ASML is currently developing hybrid bonding equipment
On October 15, the semiconductor research organization SemiAnalysis published an article stating that the lithography equipment manufacturer ASML has not officially announced related products, but patents, news reports, and the company's roadmap all indicate that it is developing hybrid bonding equipment. The author of the article judges that ASML may first launch more challenging chip-to-wafer hybrid bonding tools and view it as an extension of vertical integration.Patents show that the system operates on a track, with each chip placed in an independent carrier, sequentially completing inspection, cleaning, plasma activation, morphology inspection, leveling, coarse alignment, position adjustment, and fine alignment before entering the bonding station; the final placement is completed by the carrier and suction cup. The track's repeat accuracy is about 10 microns, far from the approximately 50 nanometers required for bonding. ASML submitted 27 bonding patent families from December 2022 to November 2024, most of which are aimed at chip-to-wafer. The Elec reported in March that ASML has begun hybrid bonding machine architecture design with Prodrive Technologies and VDL ETG.The article states that wafer-to-wafer hybrid bonding has been used for image sensors and 3D NAND; chip-to-wafer is currently only used for mass production of logic chips, including AMD's hybrid bonding V-Cache shipped since 2022 and TSMC's SoIC. The current spacing of SoIC is about 6 microns, with a target of reaching approximately 4.5 microns by 2029. Besi is currently the only supplier with chip-to-wafer mass production tools, with related logic business mainly concentrated in TSMC and Intel.
