IN Brief:
- SUSS and Manz Asia will jointly develop inkjet equipment for semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging.
- The programme combines semiconductor process expertise with digital printing, automation, and panel-level packaging capability.
- SUSS estimates the serviceable semiconductor inkjet equipment market could exceed $800 million annually by 2030.
SUSS and Manz Asia have formed a development partnership around semiconductor inkjet equipment, combining process engineering and digital printing expertise for advanced and panel-level packaging.
The agreement establishes a joint development programme rather than introducing a finished production tool. SUSS brings semiconductor process-equipment and advanced-packaging experience, while Manz Asia contributes digital printing, electrochemical deposition, wet chemistry, automation, software integration, and existing work around fan-out panel-level packaging and IC substrates.
The companies intend to accelerate development of next-generation inkjet processes and shorten the route to future commercial systems. For SUSS, the work expands a coating portfolio that increasingly has to accommodate larger substrates, more complicated package geometries, and process materials that are expensive enough to make waste a material production cost.
Inkjet addresses part of that problem through selective deposition. Material is placed only where the process requires it, avoiding the need to coat an entire surface before removing substantial areas during later patterning stages. That can reduce chemistry consumption while giving process engineers greater freedom to alter deposition patterns digitally.
The method also lends itself to structures that are less planar than a conventional semiconductor wafer. Advanced packages increasingly combine chiplets, redistribution layers, substrates, interposers, and other features with differing heights, creating surfaces on which maintaining uniform coating thickness becomes progressively more difficult.
Panel-level packaging increases the manufacturing challenge further. Larger rectangular substrates can process more devices per cycle than conventional round wafers, but the wider area increases exposure to warpage, dimensional variation, alignment error, and coating non-uniformity.
An inkjet system used in that environment has to compensate for those changes without surrendering the throughput advantage that makes panel processing attractive. Selective deposition may save material, but a production line will still be judged on yield, cycle time, uptime, repeatability, and the ease with which the process integrates with surrounding equipment.
Manz Asia’s existing position in panel-level packaging gives the collaboration a route into those manufacturing constraints. Its semiconductor activity spans wet processes, digital printing, automation, and software, allowing the partners to treat inkjet as part of a broader process flow rather than as an isolated printing operation.
SUSS has assigned substantial commercial potential to the technology. Its market assessment, based on internal research and Yole data, puts the annual serviceable equipment market for semiconductor inkjet applications above $800 million by 2030.
The forecast does not represent booked demand, and inkjet still has to compete with established coating, spraying, lithography, screen-printing, and dispensing processes. Semiconductor manufacturers are unlikely to replace qualified production steps simply because an alternative uses less material; the replacement also has to offer acceptable yield, throughput, maintenance requirements, and total process cost.
Process stability will be particularly important as inkjet moves from development into higher-volume packaging. Deposition accuracy has to remain consistent over long production runs, while the materials themselves must satisfy requirements around adhesion, curing, electrical behaviour, contamination, and long-term package reliability.
Those requirements become more demanding as substrate dimensions increase. A process that performs well on a development wafer can behave differently when scaled to a large panel where local height, temperature, or positional variations are harder to control across the entire surface.
The partnership gives SUSS access to additional manufacturing and application expertise as it works through those questions, while Manz Asia gains a route to combine its digital-printing capability with an established semiconductor process-equipment supplier and customer base.
No first jointly developed machine, customer qualification programme, or commercial release date has been announced. The next significant milestones will therefore be specific equipment and process demonstrations showing that the material-efficiency advantages of inkjet can survive semiconductor production requirements.
Advanced packaging is creating a credible opening for additive deposition, particularly as conventional coating methods encounter larger substrates and more complicated structures. Whether inkjet captures a meaningful part of the projected equipment market will depend less on the elegance of depositing only what is needed than on the familiar manufacturing measures of repeatability, yield, and throughput.
