GlobalFoundries has signed a five-year manufacturing agreement with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., valued at about $2 billion, to produce silicon interposers for TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging, Tom's Hardware reported Thursday. The parts will come from an expanded line at GlobalFoundries' fab in Malta, New York, with volume production scheduled to ramp in the first half of 2028.

What Happened

Under the agreement, GlobalFoundries will add capacity in Malta to make interposers for TSMC's CoWoS-S packaging ecosystem. The companies did not say how much capacity will be installed, but the deal includes a framework for further expansion depending on demand.

Ed Kaste, senior vice president of GlobalFoundries' CMOS business, said the arrangement uses the company's trusted U.S. manufacturing footprint to create a secure, scalable source of essential advanced-packaging components.

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Tom's Hardware said the deal establishes a U.S. manufacturing source for the parts, which would let TSMC's customers brand their products as completely made and packaged in America.

Why It Matters

Interposers are slabs of silicon that sit beneath a processor's chiplets and its high-bandwidth memory stacks, carrying the dense wiring that connects them. They are what make the large multi-die accelerators used in AI and high-performance computing possible, and CoWoS packaging capacity has been one of the tightest constraints on supply of those chips.

Almost all of TSMC's CoWoS capacity is in Taiwan. Even as TSMC builds wafer fabs in Arizona, advanced packaging in the U.S. has lagged, so chips made there have generally been sent back to Asia for packaging. A U.S. source of interposers addresses one piece of that gap. Tom's Hardware noted that shifting some interposer production to GlobalFoundries could also free TSMC's own resources for other advanced-packaging work.

The Technical Challenge

The work is not a commodity job. Interposers for CoWoS-S are tailored to each processor design, depending on the number, size and placement of the logic chiplets and memory stacks and the connections between them. They also have to meet each chip's power-delivery needs, including power distribution networks and embedded deep-trench capacitors, while managing signal integrity, power integrity and heat.

Tom's Hardware described GlobalFoundries' role as that of a subcontractor making multiple customer-specific designs, which requires close cooperation with TSMC. GlobalFoundries will need to align its design rules, manufacturing processes and qualification procedures so its interposers can drop into TSMC's CoWoS flows.

The outlet flagged two open questions. One is how the companies will handle ownership and protection of intellectual property, since interposer layouts can incorporate technology specific to TSMC and its customers. The other is stitching: the largest interposers exceed the maximum area a lithography tool can expose in one shot, so they must be stitched together from multiple exposures, and it remains to be seen how well GlobalFoundries handles that for extra-large packages.

What to Watch

Volume production is set for the first half of 2028. Before then, watch for disclosure of installed capacity, the names of TSMC customers that plan to use GlobalFoundries-made interposers, how intellectual property and qualification terms are structured, and whether the expansion framework is triggered as AI chip demand evolves.