TRUMPF moves on glass substrates for AI chips while tripling EUV laser capacity

The German laser and plasma supplier used its SEMICON Taiwan press conference to put an industrial process behind through-glass vias, and to commit to a larger footprint in Taoyuan.

TRUMPF is tripling its production capacity for EUV laser systems within two years, chief technology officer Berthold Schmidt said in Taipei on September 1, as the German supplier moved to position its coating technology for glass substrates for AI chips.

TRUMPF has supplied the drive lasers for ASML's EUV lithography systems since 2005, and the segment has grown into one of its larger businesses. The company's fact sheet puts semiconductor-related sales at around one billion euros recently, with more than 2,500 employees working on the segment out of a group total of 16,960. Schmidt did not provide current figures, noting in the press materials that TRUMPF publishes them once a year in October.

Taiwan takes a direct share of the buildout. Schmidt described the island as holding the strongest installed base of EUV systems and plasma generators in the world, and said the Regional Tech Center the company opened in Taoyuan in November last year is due for further expansion later this year. Local maintenance and repair capability for key semiconductor equipment components is being built up alongside it, and hiring is under way across TRUMPF's Taiwan sites in EUV, electronics and laser technology.

On the lithography roadmap, Schmidt said High-NA EUV will be an important addition for the most demanding process layers while Low-NA EUV remains the workhorse of advanced manufacturing for years to come.

The coating problem behind glass substrates for AI chips

The packaging side of the announcement centres on the company's HiPIMS product line, a high-power pulsed magnetron sputtering method TRUMPF has sold into other industries for years and has now aimed at glass. Chipmakers moving to glass substrates need to drill millions of holes into a panel and then line them with conductive material, and TRUMPF says it has developed the first industrial process of its kind for doing so with reproducible results.

The holes in the glass are both deep and narrow, and according to TRUMPF, a small number of incorrectly coated through-vias can render an entire glass panel unusable, which puts yield at the centre of whether the technology reaches production.

"The computing power of modern AI chips is increasing rapidly. As a result, the demand for packaging is also growing," said Piotr Lach, head of next technology demands at TRUMPF Elektronik, in the company's announcement. He said through-glass vias are seen as a promising route for future chip generations, provided millions of fine structures can be coated reliably.

TRUMPF's pitch is that its generators produce a more highly ionised plasma than conventional coating methods, and that the resulting ions can be steered into deep, narrow features using additional electric and magnetic fields. The company says this delivers more uniform coverage inside deep trenches and lifts yield.

The substrates are not there yet

The harder question for anyone selling into this space is timing, because the substrate supply chain remains some distance from volume. For context, Absolics, the SKC subsidiary that is furthest along, is in final qualification at its Georgia plant after originally targeting mass production in the first half of 2024.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics formalised a glass-core joint venture with Sumitomo Chemical's Dongwoo Fine-Chem in July, with first production targeted for the second half of 2027. Intel, which pushed the technology early, has shifted towards licensing its patents and showing demo vehicles, with its own deployment pointed at around 2030. Dai Nippon Printing began phased operation of a through-glass via pilot line at its Kuki plant in December 2025 and is targeting full mass production in fiscal 2028.

Taiwan's own candidates, including Unimicron, AUO and Innolux, sit at R&D and pilot production. That gap matters for equipment and service partners in the region, who will be asked to support qualification runs and pilot lines well before any of this turns into recurring production volume.

Cooling moves inside the stack

The third strand was thermal. 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.

"Heat dissipation will become the bottleneck for future AI processors," said Cathrin Conrad, business development manager at TRUMPF and responsible for chip cooling. 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.

Both technologies land at a show where packaging has taken centre stage. SEMICON Taiwan 2026, which runs until September 4 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, has drawn more than 1,300 exhibitors and added a Chiplet Pavilion to its packaging area this year.

TRUMPF has not said which customers are running the coating process, at what panel volumes, or when the Taoyuan expansion is due to be completed. The group publishes its annual results in October, which is the next point at which any of the semiconductor demand Schmidt described will show up in a number.