On the news front, there are media reports that TSMC is widely releasing "hero posts", calling on equipment manufacturers and compound semiconductor related manufacturers to participate, planning to apply 12 inch single crystal silicon carbide (SiC) to heat dissipation carriers, replacing traditional alumina, sapphire substrates or ceramic substrates.
At the same time, there are reports that Nvidia also plans to use silicon carbide substrates as intermediate layer materials in the advanced packaging process of the new generation GPU chips.
Why silicon carbide?
With the development of artificial intelligence technology, the performance of GPU chips and other AI servers continues to improve, and the chip power continues to increase. At the same time, in order to reduce the size and area of chips, advanced packaging has chosen to stack multiple chips at high density (such as CoWoS), which has resulted in increasingly severe heat dissipation problems in chip packaging. The traditional ceramic substrate has a thermal conductivity of about 200-230W/mK, which is difficult to meet the increasing demand for heat dissipation.
Silicon carbide materials happen to have excellent thermal conductivity. Public information shows that the thermal conductivity of silicon carbide is second only to diamond, reaching up to 400W/mK, and even close to 500W/mK, almost twice that of ceramic substrates. It is a good packaging material for data centers and AI high computing chips.