Co-Engineering the AI Era: How Materials, Process and Equipment Innovations Converge in Advanced Packaging
As AI systems scale in complexity and capability, their demands for bandwidth, power efficiency, and heterogeneous integration are rapidly outpacing the capabilities of today’s packaging interconnect solutions. The industry faces a critical inflection point: wafer- and panel-level integration platforms must evolve to overcome mounting challenges in thermal management, signal integrity, and yield—especially as extra-large die and chiplet architectures become the norm. This keynote will explore the frontier of heterogeneous integration and its pivotal role in enabling the next generation of AI hardware. We will examine emerging interconnect architectures on both wafer and panel format designed to break through current limitations, with a focus on chiplet-photonics-memory co-packaging and the enabling materials and process innovations required to support them. Crucially, in the keynote, we shall advocate for an open, collaborative ecosystem—one that fosters co-engineering in materials science, process engineering, and equipment design to drive scalable progress. Only through collective industry action can we dismantle the “integration wall” and unlock AI’s next leap.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Prahalad Parthangal is a Technical Director of Advanced Packaging at Lam Research based in Tualatin, OR. He is responsible for customer engagements and enabling heterogeneous integration roadmaps for all North American customers of Lam. He also leads strategic ecosystem engagements with research institutions and universities on emerging packaging technologies. Prior to joining Lam in 2025, he was a Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation with over 17 years of experience in process technology development, and integration across leading edge logic foundry nodes, die prep assembly as well as strategic fab technology sourcing. He has led early evaluations and qualifications of several breakthrough-equipment and process technologies throughout his career, from pathfinding through development and high-volume production phases. He holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.