Glass is the front-runner for AI chip packaging substrates, but its smooth surface won't hold wiring. Nikon's new PAP material uses light to solve it. A look at the hidden Japanese chokepoints in the chip-substrate supply chain.
RIKEN and Enplas drill 1.1-micron, aspect-ratio-1,000 holes through glass in under a nanosecond, hitting 3,000 holes a second. As the chip race shifts from shrinking to packaging, here's why glass through-glass vias matter, and where Japan's materials and equipment makers fit.
Sony Semiconductor Solutions is mass-producing the IMX711, a direct-conversion X-ray CMOS image sensor based on a pixel structure invented at Japan's RIKEN institute. With an industry-fastest 26,100fps and noise low enough to measure single X-ray photons, it ends a decades-old trade-off in X-ray imaging. Here's why battery makers, chip fabs and scientists are paying attention.
A fresh 150-billion-yen government injection pushes the state's share of Rapidus's capital to roughly 60%. Yet Tokyo capped its voting rights at 11.5%, keeping the firm out of state-enterprise territory by design. We unpack subsidies versus equity, the fate of the 2nm skeptics, and the question of who will actually buy the chips.
Asahi Kasei has developed a photosensitive polyimide film for advanced semiconductor packaging, turning a liquid material into a laminated film, the same playbook behind ABF. We explain what it means for AI chiplet packaging, how it stacks up against US and Korean rivals, and why Japan keeps winning the materials game.
GPU-to-GPU optical interconnects were forecast to arrive around 2033. NVIDIA just pulled them in by five years, putting co-packaged optics into the NVLink switch of its 2028 Feynman generation, and locking in supply with $2 billion investments in each of Lumentum and Coherent. Furukawa Electric is spending 38 billion yen to more than quintuple DFB laser chip capacity; Sumitomo Electric supplies core components for NVIDIA's Quantum-X Photonics switches but was left out of the funding round. Where Japan's optical suppliers stand, and how NTT's IOWN runs on a different clock.
Kioxia and Sandisk have achieved a world-first technological milestone toward 3D NAND flash memory exceeding 1,000 layers. Their multi-stacked cell array CMOS (MSA-CBA) structure with wafer-to-wafer Cu direct bonding successfully demonstrated QLC operation, and will be unveiled at the VLSI Symposium 2026 in Hawaii this June. We break down the technology, the three-way stacking race against Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron, and what soaring AI data center demand means for the NAND market.
Kao, famous for Biore and Attack, has brought its first overseas semiconductor cleaning center online in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Ajinomoto, the MSG maker, is putting over 25 billion yen into ABF insulation films that hold nearly 100% global share, and has bought land in Gifu for a third plant. How Japanese consumer goods companies, alongside Shin-Etsu, SUMCO, JSR and TOK, became indispensable to the AI chip supply chain, and how they compete with US, European, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese rivals.
Resonac, the world's top supplier of back-end semiconductor materials, has fully launched US-JOINT, a 12-company Japan-US consortium R&D center in Union City, California. The goal: cut proof-of-concept cycles from six months to one, and plug directly into the custom AI chip development of GAFAM-class hyperscalers.