Inside the frame

Wirebond packaging is where the discipline started. It is still half the market, and growing in automotive, industrial, medical, and power. HAT's application engineers on the wirebond side work across the portfolio that drives that growth: die attach pastes, die attach films, encapsulants, solder pastes, and wafer backside coatings. 

Most of the work is reactive. A customer hits a problem on their production line, and the team has to find an answer before the next shift. It might be a paste behaving differently on a new substrate finish, voids appearing in moisture testing, or a power module needing more thermal conductivity than any existing paste can deliver without retooling the factory line. The portfolio is broad enough that there is usually a way through. Finding that way is the work. 

The strategic case for wirebond is as solid as silicon: it works. It is cost-effective, well-understood, and the materials problems still have headroom every year. Anyone who calls wirebond mature has not been watching what is happening with power modules in electric vehicles, sensors in industrial automation, or analog ICs in medical devices. Every one of those products carries materials that started as a question on a HAT application engineer's desk. 

Advanced packaging is the frontier discipline. The packages that hold today's AI chips, HPC processors, and high-end smartphone application processors did not exist as commercial products a decade ago. HAT's application engineers on the advanced packaging side work across capillary underfills, liquid compression molding compounds, lid and stiffener attach adhesives, and thermal interface materials. Those four materials decide whether the package does its job. 

Every new architecture introduces a fresh set of contradictions. The materials need to flow well, fill the gaps cleanly, cure correctly, survive thermo-mechanical stress, and manage heat at hundreds of watts per package. The job is to find a formulation that holds all five at once. Customer cycles are short, and new chip architectures can arrive faster than the last ones can be fully tested. Six months on a single warpage problem on a very large package is normal, and the next problem is already waiting. 

Advanced packaging is where the growth lives. The biggest gains in AI hardware now come from how chips are packaged: bigger packages, stacked chiplets, and high-bandwidth memory sitting next to logic. Every one of those configurations starts as a materials problem. HAT's application engineers on the advanced packaging side work alongside the foundries, OSATs, and hyperscaler customers building the next generation of AI and high-performance computing hardware. 

Both sides of this work translate into materials across our portfolio. On the wirebond side, that includes high thermal die attach solutions and the recent breakthrough in copper sintering for next-generation power devices. On the advanced packaging side, it includes the full advanced packaging material solutions portfolio, and frontier formulations like phase change thermal interface materials for large-die data center ICs. 

The work behind the gallery happens every day, in labs and on customer floors. If a material decision is sitting on your roadmap, HAT's application engineering specialists are open to the conversation. The inspiration centers in Düsseldorf and Shanghai host the same conversations face to face.