IC design firms race to secure packaging capacity

Global IC design companies are accelerating partner network expansion to address severe packaging and testing capacity shortages that have become the most critical supply chain bottleneck. Companies f... Read original →

Advanced packaging has evolved from a back-end process into the critical bottleneck limiting chip performance realization. The surge in Chiplet-based AI and HPC designs intensifies demand for 2.5D/3D integration, raising technical barriers for OSATs and forcing IC design firms to deepen upstream collaboration. Companies from Taiwan, China, the U.S., and Europe are racing to secure capacity from leaders like ASE and SPIL, yet geopolitical friction inflates cross-border supply chain costs—especially as U.S. and EU localization mandates trigger compliance scrutiny and delivery delays. TSMC’s InFO and CoWoS lines are fully booked; Samsung and Intel cannot fill the gap soon, pushing smaller design houses into 6–9 month product delays. Within 18 months, a bifurcation will emerge: well-capitalized players will vertically integrate or co-invest in packaging fabs, while others get squeezed out of high-end markets. This crisis reveals the structural fragility of the fabless model and signals that post-Moore competition now pivots on system-level integration, not just transistor scaling.