Dive Brief:
- Glass substrate manufacturer Absolics will receive up to $75 million in CHIPS funding for its Covington, Georgia, facility, the Department of Commerce announced on May 23.
- The funding will be used to construct a 120,000-square-foot facility to develop substrates for semiconductor advanced packaging. The project will create over 1,000 construction jobs and 200 manufacturing and R&D jobs.
- The $600 million investment is in its second phase of construction after it initially broke ground in November 2022. The second phase is expected to ramp up to high-volume manufacturing in three to five years, according to the release.
Dive Insight:
The investment aims to reduce the U.S. reliance on Asia for advanced packaging substrates and supports the Department of Defense's packaging program. The DOD program aims to protect the military’s technology by expanding its microelectronics packaging capabilities.
Absolics' glass substrates will improve chip performance for AI and data centers by reducing power consumption and system complexity, according to the release.
The facility will partner with Georgia Piedmont Technical College for workforce training and continue collaborating with the 3D Packaging Research Center at Georgia Institute of Technology, which is where the project started in 2022.
The $75 million in CHIPS funding is part of a National Institute of Standards and Technology notice of funding from June 2023 seeking applications for commercial fabrication facility projects making mature-node semiconductors.
The funding amount and terms from the preliminary terms may be different from the final award, the release stated.
Absolics was established in 2021 and is an affiliate of South Korea-based chemical maker SKC, which is part of SK Group.
The semiconductor conglomerate is also investing elsewhere in the U.S. — SK Hynix, one of SK Group’s subsidaries, is planning to build a $4 billion packaging fab in Indiana, with production set to start in H2 of 2028.
