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Last month, Anwar Ibrahim, the prime minister of Malaysia, revealed in a post on Facebook that Intel is expanding its Malaysian chip-making facilities, which were first established back in the 1970s. Ibrahim said the head of Intel\u2019s Foundry, Naga Chandrasekaran, had \u201coutlined plans to commence the first phase\u201d of expansion, which would include advanced packaging.<\/p>\n
\u201cI welcome Intel\u2019s decision to begin operations for the complex later this year,\u201d a translated version of Ibrahim\u2019s post read. An Intel spokesperson, John Hipsher, confirmed that it\u2019s building out additional chip assembly and test capacity in Penang, \u201camid rising global demand for Intel Foundry packaging solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Chandrasekaran, who took over Intel\u2019s Foundry operations in 2025 and spoke exclusively with WIRED during the reporting of this story, the term \u201cadvanced packaging\u201d itself didn\u2019t exist a decade ago.<\/p>\n
Chips have always required some sort of integration of transistors and capacitors, which control and store energy. For a long time the semiconductor industry was focused on miniaturization, or, shrinking the size of components on chips. As the world began demanding more from its computers in the 2010s, chips started to get even more dense with processing units, high-bandwidth memory, and all of the necessary connective parts. Eventually, chipmakers started to take a system-in-packages or package-on-package approach, in which multiple components were stacked on top of one another in order to squeeze more power and memory out of the same surface space. 2D stacking gave way to 3D stacking.<\/p>\n
TSMC, the world\u2019s leading semiconductor manufacturer, began offering packaging technologies like CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) and, later, SoIC (system on integrated chip) to customers. Essentially, the pitch was that TSMC would handle not just the front end of chip-making\u2014the wafer part\u2014but also the back end, where all of the chip tech would be packaged together.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n