SkyWater Technology and Deca Technologies have been granted a $120 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to expand domestic fan-out wafer level packaging (FOWLP) for semiconductors for use by government and commercial vendors.
The expansion will be made possible through the five-year DoD contract for its facilities in Osceola County, Florida. The award includes options for an additional $70 million, or a total of $190 million for reshoring FOWLP packaging technologies. Reshoring refers to when companies return manufacturing capabilities to their domestic countries and eliminate or reduce foreign made parts.
Through the SkyWater and Deca collaboration, embedded devices including active and passive bridge die as well as integrated passives are planned. SkyWater will implement Deca’s adaptive patterning to scale device interface density with wider process windows.
The award is part of DoD’s Re-shore Ecosystem for Secure Heterogenous Advanced Packaged Electronics (RESHAPE) efforts that directly supports the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen America’s semiconductor supply chain.
Currently, less than 3% of semiconductor advanced packaging manufacturing takes place in the U.S. The government calls this a risk to national security as well as the economy due to chips going overseas for advanced packaging.
As part of the expansion, SkyWater will be acquiring, installing and qualifying new equipment at the Florida facility that will support FOWLP processing of incoming 200mm and 300mm device wafer formats.
