Could Hybrid Bonding Equipment become a Commodity?
Today $SMHN announced the launch of their D2W Hybrid Bonding tool; developed in collaboration with #SET, a private French Die Attach company. An interesting metric they reveal is that their tool achieves 200nm accuracy; of course they do not say at what throughput, UPH.But there is a much larger point here. #HybridBonding is on its way to becoming an enabling technology for #Chiplets with potentially wide scale adoption in high volume applications.But, as opposed to say TCB where there was one customer ($Intel(INTC.US)) and one supplier (#ASMPT), when it comes to Hybrid Bonding, just off the top of my head, I can think of close to 10 companies working on tools: $BESI #ASMPT $SMHN #Semes #HanmiSemiconductor #Hanwha #Shinkawa/Yamada Robotics $Kulicke and Soffa(KLIC.US).Each tool supplier is slightly different and there are some companies who have been working on this longer and have tools with better performance or higher throughput.But in the end, those advantages won’t hold up. If Hybrid Bonding takes off on mass scale there will be different types of applications that use it, and there will be different levels of requirements for each application. Customers will select from the growing menu of suppliers, and they will pick a tool that gets their job done at a price they can afford; or rather the lowest cost possible.Moreover, the number one cardinal rule in WFE is that no one wants a single supplier. It doesn’t matter if you are $Intel(INTC.US) $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) #SKHynix $Apple(AAPL.US) or anyone else. Customers will actively ensure they have a robust supply chain with at least 2 suppliers, if not more. $ASML(ASML.US) is an aberration and a very unique situation; and a situation customers are not happy about and motivated to ensure doesn’t happen again.The point is this: If a Hybrid Bonding equipment company projects the total TAM as their future revenue, they are materially over-inflating the size of the business they will win. This is shaping up to be a situation much more akin to Flip Chip rather than TCB, and each company needs to be very careful about how much market share they project winning.Source: Chips & Wafers
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