Highlights from the IMAPS Onshoring Advanced Packaging Workshop in Washington, D.C.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

IMAPS and the Global Electronics Association co-hosted the Onshoring Advanced Packaging and Assembly Workshop in Washington, D.C., in early September. Government leaders, including those from the Department of Defense, attended and were directly involved in organizing the content of the sessions. Jim Will, director of the U.S. Partnership for Assured Electronics, speaks about his role in the event.

Marcy LaRont: Jim, it is great to see IMAPS and the Association continuing to work together closely on some of these high-level technology challenges. What are some highlights from this event?

Jim Will: The workshop was a great success, with outstanding attendance from government and Department of Defense leaders, as well as industry representatives across the supply chain, including advanced packaging providers and Prime integrators. We were also joined by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Minitherms 3D and Next Generation Manufacturing Program (NGMM), which is establishing advanced heterogeneous integration capabilities in Texas, with plans to include prototyping and low-volume manufacturing in the future.

Industry performers from the Re-shore Ecosystem for Secure Heterogeneous Advanced Packaged Electronics (RESHAPE), a Department of Defense IBAS initiative to onshore advanced packaging with a focus on 2D, 2.5D, and 3D Heterogeneous Integration (HGI), including fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP) and 300 mm back-end processes, were also represented, including Micross and SkyWater.

Industry partners representing capabilities now being established through Department of Defense initiatives, particularly those enabled by the DPA Title III funding program, participated. This includes ongoing work to develop ultra high density interconnect (UHDI) PCB and substrate capabilities through efforts from TTM, Calumet, and GreenSource.  Draper provided updates on their fan-out advanced packaging capability as well.

LaRont: What is the intent or mission of this workshop?

Will: This workshop is intended to connect the defense industrial base and government to develop actionable plans and to demonstrate the successes of working hardware from domestic assured sources. Building hardware prototypes leveraging our investments and capability in the advanced packaging space is critical to ensuring mission readiness, validating assurance and supply-chain resilience, and enhancing warfighting effectiveness and mission capability, while also enabling the ability to scale and surge our industrial base.

In the near term, these efforts are driven primarily by defense and national security needs. Over the longer term, however, their success will depend on establishing sustained market demand to support the facilities we are working to build. As seen in areas such as LCD panel displays, constructing the bricks and mortar is not enough. Without a strong demand signal, U.S. companies cannot remain engaged. In the past, China has exploited this gap to secure long-term market dominance. That is precisely the pattern we must avoid repeating.

So, being brutally honest, the primary intent of the workshop is to prevent that type of situation from ever happening again. Achieving that means ensuring we are actively using and sustaining these capabilities through domestic assured sources, rather than allowing them to slip away .

LaRont: Was there anything interesting, surprising or encouraging that TTM, Calumet, or GreenSource shared?

Will: Yes. It’s good to see that while they’re still in the process of setting up the capabilities funded through the Defense Production Act Title III program, they’re making excellent progress. All three reported being on schedule and on or under budget, which is impressive.

They are now demonstrating key capabilities in PCB manufacturing, such as vias, line widths, and spacing, and it’s exciting to see the progress firsthand. The next step should be to begin using them as demonstrators, which will accelerate their learning and maturity. That type of engagement is essential to ensure these processes are fully validated and ready to scale in support of the DoD and the broader assured market, including critical infrastructure.

LaRont: Speaking of more direct industry engagement with manufacturers, were there many OEMs and OSATs in attendance?

Will: We had strong participation from the Prime integrators, including Northrop Grumman, RTX, L3Harris, and Lockheed Martin. There were also a few non-defense attendees, primarily tied to federal programs. Among the OEMs, OSATs, and academic partners, Applied Materials, Absolics, DECA, and ASU were represented as performers in the NAPMP Substrate Program.

Unlike the traditional defense contractors, Absolics is a U.S.-based subsidiary of SKC in South Korea. With government support, they are establishing glass substrate manufacturing in the U.S., anchored by their new facility in Georgia that will produce glass-based substrates and systems for next-generation semiconductor packaging. Glass substrates are a critical enabler for heterogeneous integration and advanced packaging, and this was the first time Absolics shared details of their progress which made it especially important for the defense industrial base to understand the capabilities and services they will provide.

LaRont: What were the biggest takeaways, and what did you most hope to accomplish in this workshop?

Will: There were a few important takeaways. One of the most significant was the repeated emphasis throughout several sessions on the need to establish standards for these emerging technologies. For advanced packaging capabilities to be more broadly adopted, we must develop clear recommendations and standards on materials and processes so the wider community can design them in with confidence and fully leverage them. This would also allow the DoD to reference these standards and incorporate them into its more specific MIL standards as it develops new microelectronic components .

What stands out most is how directly this ties to DoD and national security needs. We saw real progress, working hardware, and truly game-changing capabilities. It’s clear that our federal and industry investments are delivering results, advancing capabilities critical to the mission. We saw progress on DARPA’s hard problems being addressed by in areas such as heterogeneous integration. I sometimes joke about the ‘Star Trek’ Holodeck when talking about these increasingly complex microsystems, but what once felt like science fiction is quickly becoming reality. This kind of progress will be central to mission readiness, warfighting effectiveness, and strengthening our defense and economic security. That is why we must remain committed to accelerating these efforts, scaling capabilities, and ensuring our nation leads in the technologies that will define the future.

LaRont: Thank you, Jim. It sounds like a very production workshop.

Will: Yes, thank you, Marcy.