Jun 26, 2026 · 30 min · 9 segments
Host: Nicola Marchese Guest: Isaac Sigron, Managing Director at Koch Disruptive Technologies 👉 Subscribe to our newsletter for more…
Isaac SigronGuest
Nicola MarcheseHost
And given that we have a generalist audience from space technology to medical device to semiconductor, can you introduce the topic of advanced packages for those maybe hearing this terminology for the first time?
It's actually, it's not a straightforward question, right? Because advanced packaging, you know, kind of by its name, it's, you know, some advanced topics in semiconductors.
So you need to, you know, it's hard to learn how to run before you walk, but let me give it a try here.
So I just take it from like the very beginnings, right? What is a chip? A chip is like layers of silicone.
which is a semiconductor, insulators, and copper that you can switch together to really implement elements of logics and memory.
Now, it could do other things, RF, et cetera, but I'm going to focus this discussion about digital chips because this is kind of more interesting for advanced packaging.
And so for a while, when Moore's law was active, for the guys of you who don't know, Moore's law was founded by Gordon Moore.
And let's say that the industry goal is to double the transistor density every two years.
So once it was active and the industry was actually successful in doing that, the name of the game was basically just to implement more and more of these transistors of logic and memory inside the same size of die.
And so basically, you're writing or you're drawing your picture inside the chips in an ever-narrowing pen tip.
But as we can, you know, as we have witnessed, the content, compute power, memory capacity, networking, bandwidth, et cetera, et cetera, increased orders of magnitude.
About a decade ago, as transistors were starting to get very, very small, sub-10 nanometer, it was becoming much, much harder to increase transistor density.
And so in order to kind of achieve the insatiable appetite for increased computer, compute, memory, et cetera, incumbents started to increase the size of the chip.
When the density, you cannot increase it to x every year, so you increase it by 50%, say, and then you start increasing the size of the chip.
Uh, I can go into that, but, uh, but the main idea is that, you know, you have, uh, the, the, the, usually the yield or the defects in a, in a semiconductor are proportional to the area of the chip.
So then the bigger, the chip, the, the, the more likelihood they're going to be an error in the chip.
And so, you know, that goes kind of the first problem, second problem that actually apparently So it used to be you're going to build, for the most part, a logic chip.
And given that we have a generalist audience from space technology to medical device to semiconductor, can you introduce the topic of advanced packages for those maybe hearing this terminology for the first time?
It's actually, it's not a straightforward question, right? Because advanced packaging, you know, kind of by its name, it's, you know, some advanced topics in semiconductors.
So you need to, you know, it's hard to learn how to run before you walk, but let me give it a try here.
So I just take it from like the very beginnings, right? What is a chip? A chip is like layers of silicone.
which is a semiconductor, insulators, and copper that you can switch together to really implement elements of logics and memory.
Now, it could do other things, RF, et cetera, but I'm going to focus this discussion about digital chips because this is kind of more interesting for advanced packaging.
And so for a while, when Moore's law was active, for the guys of you who don't know, Moore's law was founded by Gordon Moore.
And let's say that the industry goal is to double the transistor density every two years.
So once it was active and the industry was actually successful in doing that, the name of the game was basically just to implement more and more of these transistors of logic and memory inside the same size of die.
And so basically, you're writing or you're drawing your picture inside the chips in an ever-narrowing pen tip.
But as we can, you know, as we have witnessed, the content, compute power, memory capacity, networking, bandwidth, et cetera, et cetera, increased orders of magnitude.
About a decade ago, as transistors were starting to get very, very small, sub-10 nanometer, it was becoming much, much harder to increase transistor density.
And so in order to kind of achieve the insatiable appetite for increased computer, compute, memory, et cetera, incumbents started to increase the size of the chip.
When the density, you cannot increase it to x every year, so you increase it by 50%, say, and then you start increasing the size of the chip.
Uh, I can go into that, but, uh, but the main idea is that, you know, you have, uh, the, the, the, usually the yield or the defects in a, in a semiconductor are proportional to the area of the chip.
So then the bigger, the chip, the, the, the more likelihood they're going to be an error in the chip.
And so, you know, that goes kind of the first problem, second problem that actually apparently So it used to be you're going to build, for the most part, a logic chip.
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