At SEMICON West, I caught up with Allen Phung, head of sales at Koh Young America, where we pivoted from our more traditional focus on SMT-related tech to talking about semiconductors and advanced packaging. Koh Young’s semiconductor business provides inspection and metrology systems for advanced packaging, including micro-solder deposits, high-density substrates, and wafer-level packaging, addressing the demanding requirements as components shrink and interconnect complexity grows.

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As AI and high-performance computing push advanced packaging toward greater complexity, manufacturers must expand capacity while protecting yield on increasingly valuable assemblies. At SEMICON West, Nordson Electronic Solutions’ Jeanine Norlin, senior manager of marketing, and Liam Thorp, product line manager, discuss how the company is addressing those demands through plasma surface treatment and precision dispensing. They explain how plasma improves wettability and underfill flow, how the ASYMTEK Vantage XL handles large-panel warpage, and why coordinated process expertise across Nordson’s businesses is becoming more important for manufacturing reliability.

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The semiconductor industry is moving beyond traditional chip-level scaling toward interconnected computing architectures. Growing demand for AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and data-intensive applications requires greater computing capacity, memory bandwidth, and communication efficiency. As we know, advanced packaging plays an important role in supporting the semiconductor technologies that enable these systems. While scale-up increases the capability of tightly coupled computing systems, scale-out enables those resources to work together at a larger infrastructure level.

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Ask engineers how to design electronics for extreme environments, and you’ll hear plenty of confident answers, like “Use thicker copper” or “Add a heat sink.” That advice is useful, but it is not enough. When electronics fail in harsh environments because of temperature, shock, and vibration, it is rarely due to a single obvious mistake. More often, failure results from a chain of small, “good enough” decisions that cannot withstand extreme stress.

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