Applied Materials says equipment lead-time delays to ease in 2-3 years; hybrid bonding timeline up to customers

As surging demand for advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment stretches delivery lead times by as much as double, Applied Materials said Monday the situation should improve significantly within two to three years.

Applied Materials made the remarks at the "DRAM and Advanced Packaging Forum for the AI Era," held Monday at Oakwood Premier COEX Center in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

"Our most important role is to forecast long-term demand with our customers and supply equipment on time to match that demand," said Park Kwang-sun, president of Applied Materials Korea. "We are working to provide uninterrupted staffing and technology support for global expansions such as SK hynix's Indiana fab and Samsung Electronics' Taylor fab."

Park said the company is focused less on the immediate months ahead and more on how the broader ecosystem can prepare to overcome the strain from explosive demand. "Our immediate response capacity is extremely limited, but things will be much better two to three years from now," he said.

A wave of equipment orders from chipmakers has stretched lead times for major products from the world's five largest equipment suppliers — Applied Materials, ASML, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron and KLA — to 1.5 to 2 times their previous levels.

With global semiconductor manufacturers simultaneously expanding their fabs, equipment supply has been unable to keep pace with orders.

"We are having far closer and more frequent discussions with our partners on how to resolve this issue than before, so over the long term, many of these problems will be resolved," Park added.

Meanwhile, the adoption of hybrid bonding — a key technology for next-generation HBM production — has been delayed by yield issues, but Applied Materials said it holds the foundational technologies to support the bonding approaches being explored separately by both Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.

"Hybrid bonding offers better thermal efficiency and higher die density than bump-based methods, and it is essential for 3D stacking," said Mukund Srinivasan, vice president at Applied Materials. "As has always been the case at every inflection point with new technology, there is a learning curve that must be worked through. The issues will be overcome."

HBM, which stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically, is currently produced using thermocompression bonding equipment, a process that applies heat and pressure to join the dies. TC bonding uses a material called micro-bumps between each DRAM layer to create electrical connections, which adds to the overall thickness of the HBM stack and increases power consumption during data transfer.

Hybrid bonding, by contrast, joins copper directly to copper without micro-bumps, making it an essential technology for reducing the total thickness of increasingly tall HBM stacks while delivering higher performance.

"When hybrid bonding will be commercialized is a question of timing," Srinivasan said. "That is a question for our customers to answer, not us."

Applied Materials also highlighted co-packaged optics, or CPO, as a promising technology that changes the medium of signal transmission itself. CPO integrates electronic and optical chips at the package level to transmit data as optical signals, enabling higher bandwidth and greater energy efficiency.

The company is currently conducting research and development on the materials, process technology and equipment needed to implement CPO.

"We are working closely with customers who are interested in these advanced technologies and providing support on the technical side," Srinivasan said.