- The company’s HiPIMS process targets the through-glass vias that have held back glass substrates for AI chips.
- The substrate lines it is built for are still in pilot production, with the earliest volume target in the second half of 2027.
TRUMPF has developed what it describes as the first industrial process of its kind for coating the millions of microscopic vias drilled through glass substrates for AI chips, the German laser and plasma supplier said at a press conference in Taipei on September 1, ahead of SEMICON Taiwan 2026.
The industry transition began about three years ago, when Intel put glass substrates on its roadmap in 2023. Glass is lined up to replace organic materials as the base layer of high-end chip packages. The reason is that it stays flatter across large panels and allows denser vertical connections between the stacked dies in an AI accelerator.
The process runs on the company’s HiPIMS product line. High-power impulse magnetron sputtering produces a more heavily ionised plasma than conventional deposition methods, and TRUMPF says the resulting ions can be steered into deep, narrow features using additional electric and magnetic fields, which gives more even coverage along the length of a trench. The company has sold HiPIMS into other industries for years and has now aimed it at glass.
Through-glass vias are deep relative to their width, and metal that thins out partway down the channel produces a via that passes visual inspection and fails electrically later. According to TRUMPF, a small number of incorrectly coated vias can render an entire glass panel unusable, which is why yield rather than capability decides whether the technology reaches production.
“What matters most is that processes can be scaled and replicated consistently worldwide,” said Piotr Lach, head of next technology demands at TRUMPF Elektronik, in the company’s announcement. TRUMPF has not published customer data behind its yield claims, and has named no reference installation running the process in volume.
A second tool aimed at heat
The same press conference put a second constraint on the table. Chief technology officer Berthold Schmidt said many in the industry now treat heat removal as a key bottleneck for the next generation of AI processors, as compute performance climbs faster than the ability to move thermal energy out of an increasingly dense package.
TRUMPF showed an ultrashort-pulse laser application for the first time that it says allows cooling structures to be produced inside chip stacks at industrial scale, in materials including silicon carbide and diamond. The company says the laser ablates silicon carbide with micrometre precision and runs at least five times faster than etching for these structures, a figure it has not benchmarked publicly. Leading manufacturers have already placed microfluidic cooling and heat spreaders on their development roadmaps, and these structures are intended to serve them.
The glass substrates are still in pilot production
Both tools arrive ahead of the customers who would buy them at scale. Samsung Electro-Mechanics holds the earliest declared volume target in glass substrates, having formalised a glass-core joint venture with Sumitomo Chemical’s Dongwoo Fine-Chem in July with production aimed at the second half of 2027. Absolics, the SKC subsidiary running the most advanced Western facility, is in final qualification at its plant in Covington, Georgia, after originally targeting mass production in the first half of 2024.Â
Dai Nippon Printing brought a through-glass via pilot line at its Kuki plant into phased operation in December 2025, shipped early samples in the first months of 2026, and is holding a fiscal 2028 window. Intel, which did more than any other company to build early expectations around glass, has moved towards licensing its patents and demonstrating test vehicles, with commercial deployment of its own now pointed at around 2030.
What has slipped in each case is the manufacturing rather than the concept. Panels crack and warp under thermal load, vias have to be drilled and metallised in their millions without failure, and qualification cycles run long because packaging customers cannot afford a substrate that fails late in assembly.
Taiwanese panel makers including Unimicron, AUO and Innolux remain in R&D and pilot validation as the local supply chain organises around TSMC’s future packaging architecture. Their qualification schedules, rather than the tool vendors’, will set the pace.
None of that makes TRUMPF’s timing unusual. Tool qualification has to precede process qualification in semiconductor manufacturing, and equipment suppliers routinely commit years before a technology generates revenue. The contrast with the rest of the company’s semiconductor business is still stark. TRUMPF is tripling production capacity for the EUV laser systems it has supplied to ASML since 2005, a decision backed by installed base and visible demand, while the packaging tools are aimed at lines that do not yet exist at scale.
The readiness claims landing this year are best read as positioning for the qualification runs of 2027 and 2028. TRUMPF publishes its annual results in October, the next point at which any of the demand described in Taipei will appear as a number.
