Applied Materials and Besi (a leading semiconductor assembly and packaging provider) are expanding their partnership through the EPIC (Electronics Packaging Industry Consortium) Center for advanced AI chip packaging.

Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) and Besi (EU:BESI) are expanding their AI advanced packaging partnership, with Besi now joining Applied's EPIC Center as an Innovation Partner. The expanded collaboration extends beyond their previous work in hybrid bonding to encompass 3D IC integration, thermo-compression bonding, panel-scale packaging, and photonics technologies designed to support AI system scaling.

The companies first began collaborating through a joint development program in 2020, establishing a Center of Excellence in Singapore that combined Applied's semiconductor process technologies with Besi's die placement and assembly capabilities. That work produced Kinex, which the companies describe as the industry's first integrated die-to-wafer hybrid bonding system.

The expanded partnership will cover a broader portion of the advanced packaging process. Planned R&D includes new die-to-wafer hybrid bonding platforms, scaling of thermo-compression bonding, die-on-wafer, die-on-die, and die-on-panel integration, and photonics-enabled interconnects for co-packaged optics and AI systems. The work is expected to focus particularly on next-generation 3D IC scaling and integration between logic and memory.

Besi engineers will work alongside Applied teams at the EPIC Center, potentially giving mutual customers earlier access to jointly developed packaging processes. Applied expects capital spending on its Silicon Valley EPIC Center to scale over time to approximately $5 billion as customer projects begin.

The partnership positions advanced packaging as a larger part of Applied Materials' AI-related technology roadmap. As AI systems require increasingly close integration between compute, memory, and other components, the manufacturing challenge extends beyond producing individual chips to connecting them efficiently within larger systems. Expanding the Besi partnership may allow Applied to address more of that integration process by combining its materials engineering and wafer-processing expertise with Besi's assembly and bonding technologies.