IN Brief:
- SEMI’s SMC 2026 will run from 13–15 July in San Jose.
- The programme focuses on materials for AI, advanced packaging, quantum devices, and manufacturing scale-up.
- Semiconductor growth is increasing pressure on materials supply, process integration, and industrialisation from lab to fab.
SEMI will bring materials and semiconductor leaders together at its Strategic Materials Conference 2026, with the programme focused on the materials base needed to support AI-era semiconductor growth.
The event will run from 13–15 July at Hayes Mansion in San Jose under the theme “Materials Innovation in the AI Era: Powering Semiconductors to One Trillion Dollars and Beyond.” The agenda covers market and geopolitical trends, materials for scalable AI systems, advanced packaging and materials integration, industrialisation of next-generation materials, quantum and emerging devices, and supply-chain resilience.
Featured speakers include representatives from Mitsubishi Chemical, Lam Research, Intel, Avalanche Thinking, Applied Materials, Boston Materials, EMD Electronics, Entegris, General Graphene, Georgia Institute of Technology, GlobalFoundries, NVIDIA, Qnity Electronics, Rapidus, Resonac, and SkyWater Technology.
AI demand is pushing advanced logic, high-bandwidth memory, interconnect, packaging, power delivery, and cooling technologies forward at the same time. Materials are no longer a background procurement category. They influence device performance, process windows, yield, reliability, packaging density, thermal behaviour, and factory throughput.
Advanced packaging is one of the clearest pressure points. AI processors increasingly depend on chiplets, interposers, HBM stacks, substrates, and high-density interconnect. Each layer brings materials challenges: dielectric performance, coefficient of thermal expansion, mechanical stress, warpage, bonding quality, underfill behaviour, thermal conductivity, and long-term reliability.
The package has become part of the semiconductor system rather than a protective enclosure. As more functions are split across chiplets and assembled into dense compute modules, packaging materials have to support both electrical performance and mechanical stability. Poor thermal or mechanical behaviour can erase the gains made at device level.
Materials also shape the route from research to production. A promising new film, interconnect material, bonding method, or substrate technology has limited value until it can be deposited, patterned, measured, cleaned, inspected, and qualified at scale. Moving from lab to fab is a difficult industrial process involving tool compatibility, contamination control, defectivity, supply continuity, and yield learning.
AlixLabs’ Sax Forma atomic pitch splitting platform and the TNO-ASML InP photonic chip pilot line show how manufacturing access, process control, and materials integration are becoming decisive for emerging semiconductor technologies. Different device classes are meeting the same industrial constraint: laboratory performance has to become repeatable production.
The policy context is also changing. Europe, the US, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all investing in semiconductor capacity, but materials supply chains remain global, specialised, and vulnerable to disruption. Europe’s expanded chip policy framework keeps leading-edge logic, memory, packaging, and design in view, yet those ambitions depend on gases, chemicals, wafers, resists, CMP slurries, substrates, metrology consumables, and specialist suppliers that rarely receive the same public attention as fabs.
AI hardware adds urgency because the demand curve is steep and technically demanding. Larger models and higher inference volumes increase the requirement for advanced nodes, HBM, high-speed networking, and dense power delivery. That demand flows back into materials: better low-k dielectrics, high-performance substrates, thermal interface materials, advanced photoresists, high-purity chemicals, and packaging materials all become part of the scaling equation.
Quantum and emerging devices add a different set of constraints. These technologies often depend on unusual materials, tight defect control, cryogenic performance, or device structures that do not map cleanly onto conventional CMOS manufacturing. Bringing them into repeatable production will require materials suppliers to work more closely with equipment makers, fabs, research institutes, and design teams.
SMC 2026 lands as the semiconductor industry pursues higher compute density while dealing with tighter supply chains, geopolitical intervention, and more complex packaging. Materials decisions are increasingly visible in performance, cost, and resilience. The conference will gather many of the companies and technical disciplines now required to move semiconductor scaling forward.
