ASE Holdings conducted an earning conference on October 26th to unveil its Q3 financial results and offer insights into future business prospects. All eyes are on ASE’s progress in CoWoS advanced packaging. Joseph Tung, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of ASE, expressed confidence in AI and ongoing investments in advanced packaging, expecting a twofold increase in revenue share for advanced packaging in the coming year.

The market’s attention is keenly focused on wafer bank (a storage system used in semiconductor manufacturing to keep semiconductor wafers on hand for production, helping to streamline the manufacturing process) levels and inventory management. Tung mentioned that wafer bank levels are consistently declining and will further reduce Q4. With consumer electronics and computer clients gearing up to launch new products, inventory levels are expected to be maintained at a certain level. Overall, inventory reduction is nearing completion.

Tung emphasized that the real challenge lies not in inventory reduction but in the timing of the recovery in consumer demands and the impact of inflation. ASE remains cautious in its outlook for the upcoming year.

As for AI-related developments, Tung is optimistic about the expansion of CoWoS advanced packaging capacity through TSMC. ASE is also set to boost its production capacity for advanced packaging to cater to urgent customer demands. Next year, it is expected that revenue in advanced packaging will double. Tung emphasized that the AI era has already arrived and expects AI to extend to more terminal devices over the next few years. ASE has also invested in the development of Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) technology, ready to meet customer demands when the market is prepared.

To seize opportunities in advanced packaging, ASE previously introduced an Integrated Design Ecosystem (IDE) to optimize collaborative design tools through a platform, systematically enhancing advanced packaging architecture. This initiative has the potential to reduce design cycles by approximately 50%.

Tung pointed out that there are signs of a recovery in PC-related chip testing and packaging, and this year’s performance in automotive chip testing and packaging is expected to outperform other segments.

Looking ahead to future market conditions, Tung believes that the global semiconductor industry’s environment in the coming year will be more favorable than the current year.

(Image: ASE)

Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (ASE) has unveiled its Integrated Design Ecosystem™ (IDE) – a collaborative design toolkit, meticulously tailored to enhance advanced package architecture on the VIPack™ platform. This innovation streamlines the transition from single-die SoC to multi-die disaggregated IP blocks, encompassing chiplets and memory integration through 2.5D or advanced fanout structures.

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