AMD says 2.1D packaging is still a couple of years away

EE Times had an interview with AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster. Not a lot of new things were said, and Papermaster refused to comment on what the company will use beyond 7nm. At the moment, AMD's public roadmap calls for the use of second-gen 7nm with EUV for Zen 3, probably sometime in 2020.

There was also a little chat about 2.1D packaging, but it seems this technology is still several years out. At the moment, AMD uses 2.5D stacking tech but it's quite expensive for mainstream products, which is part of the reason why Fiji and Vega were so expensive.

Meanwhile, AMD is still waiting on so-called 2.1D packaging options such as versions of the wafer-level fan-out packages used in smartphones suitable for high performance PC and server chips. Last year, Papermaster said such options are two to three years away. This year, they don’t seem much closer.

“We see OSATS push new techniques. 2.5D is proven…and experiments with other multilayer stacking techniques will bear fruit over time…I think we will see [alternatives to 2.5D packaging] in the next several years,” he said.

AMD beat rival Nvidia in 2015 by releasing Fiji, a graphics processor and memory stack on a 2.5D package. But the technique is relatively expensive and so far has not been suitable for mainstream users such as PC gamers.