FORT WASHINGTON, PA — Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc. (NASDAQ: KLIC) has received the 2026 SEMI Award for North America for a semiconductor bonding technology designed to reduce manufacturing complexity and costs as chipmakers pursue denser interconnections for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
The Fort Washington-based semiconductor equipment manufacturer received the recognition for its proprietary fluxless thermo-compression bonding technology, which uses formic acid during the bonding process to address manufacturing challenges associated with increasingly compact semiconductor packages.
The award was presented during the CEO Summit Keynotes at SEMICON West, recognizing the company’s technical and commercial contributions to semiconductor manufacturing.
The technology addresses a growing constraint in advanced chip production: connecting increasingly complex semiconductor components without adding excessive manufacturing steps or costs.
As chipmakers combine different semiconductor components within a single package, the density and reliability of connections between those components have become increasingly important to overall system performance.
Traditional thermo-compression bonding frequently requires flux cleaning after components are joined, a process that becomes more difficult as the spacing between electrical connections decreases.
Hybrid bonding offers an alternative for creating dense connections but can introduce additional manufacturing complexity and expense.
Kulicke & Soffa’s approach combines plasma pre-cleaning with formic acid treatment during bonding to remove surface oxides without requiring conventional flux cleaning.
The company said the process supports interconnect pitches below 10 microns while maintaining manufacturing yields and simplifying production.
The technology can be applied across wafer-level, substrate-level and panel-level manufacturing, potentially broadening its use in advanced semiconductor packaging.
“As semiconductor performance is now critically dependent on advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration, the industry’s ability to scale interconnect density efficiently and economically becomes more important than ever,” said Raj Talluri, Kulicke & Soffa’s chief executive officer.
The bonding process is a central component of the company’s advanced packaging strategy, including its APTURA platform.
Kulicke & Soffa is positioning the technology for applications involving AI processors, high-performance computing systems and silicon photonics, where increasing interconnect density is essential to integrating multiple semiconductor components.
John Molnar, vice president and general manager of advanced solutions, said the technology is intended to deliver performance comparable to hybrid bonding while reducing manufacturing barriers.
“By enabling hybrid-bonding-class performance with more accessible manufacturing, we are accelerating the adoption of advanced packaging solutions required for next-generation AI, high-performance computing, silicon photonics, and other rapidly growing semiconductor markets,” Molnar said.
The company’s broader advanced packaging portfolio includes thermo-compression bonding, hybrid bonding technologies, wedge bonding and vertical interconnect solutions.
The SEMI recognition comes as semiconductor manufacturers increasingly rely on advanced packaging to improve computing performance, making bonding equipment and interconnect technology an important area of competition among equipment suppliers.
For Kulicke & Soffa, the award recognizes a manufacturing approach intended to help customers produce more densely interconnected semiconductor packages while managing the technical and economic demands of advanced chip production.
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