According to sources in the supply chain quoted by Taiwanese media, Qualcomm plans to jointly develop new products with ASE and SPIL, aiming to benchmark Apple's M-series chips.
In the first quarter of this year, Qualcomm convened ASE Investment Holdings and its subsidiary Siliconware and other packaging and testing foundry (OSAT) companies, and worked with OSAT-side R&D personnel at Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters, which lasted about 3 months to around June 2023 Plan to develop new products, hoping to benchmark Apple's M-series chips.
According to the report, Qualcomm called ASE Group and its internal RD high-end personnel to actively develop new products. In addition to advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes, various mid-to-high-end or advanced packaging and testing technologies are also one of Qualcomm's necessary strategic considerations.
In recent years, as Apple has gradually separated from Intel, Apple's self-developed chips have expanded from the A-series processors to the M-series. The iPhone processor adopts InFO_PoP technology in TSMC's advanced packaging platform 3D Fabric, which is considered to be the most successful case of fan-out (Fan-out) packaging for mobile phone AP import.
In this regard, ASE Group has also listed a series of mid-to-high-end and advanced packaging technologies that compete with TSMC's 3D Fabric platform, including FO-PoP and FO-EB, which are derived from fan-out technology, and continue to propose mature HB -PoP, FC-BGA and other mainstream flip-chip packages.
