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Akeana Collaborates with Samsung Electronics, Fast-Tracking RISC-V Customers and Ecosystem for Server and Agentic AI Silicon
The article introduces the Vertical System EM Corridor (VEMC) as a new paradigm for AI packaging, moving beyond traditional flat, planar architectures. As AI platforms demand higher bandwidth, power density, and heterogeneous integration, packages are no longer just flat routing surfaces but must become vertical realization environments. The VEMC is the physical path where signal integrity, return current, power integrity, thermal and mechanical behavior, and geometry interact. In current systems, this corridor is largely lateral; future large AI systems require vertical extension. Glass substrates and through-glass vias (TGVs) enable this, offering dimensional stability and fine interconnect scaling. However, vertical routing alone is insufficient—every high-speed signal needs a controlled return path via nearby ground-reference TGVs to avoid impedance discontinuity and signal degradation. A future AI package may integrate compute, memory, power delivery, and optical transition zones across multiple vertical regions. Traffic will be hybrid: short, dense electrical links (GPU-to-HBM) and longer paths better suited for optical conversion. Power delivery also becomes vertical, moving closer to silicon via chiplet-proximate architectures, with controlled vertical paths and embedded decoupling. Optical transition zones are selectively introduced where distance and bandwidth justify conversion, requiring careful electro-optical realization. The VEMC differs from 2.5D/3D packaging, which focus on physical placement; VEMC emphasizes the full realization path where electrical, optical, power, thermal, and mechanical behaviors must remain coherent for trusted system output. The industry is moving from integration to trusted realization—ensuring that a vertically integrated package operates stably, reliably, and scalably under real conditions. This matters now because AI hardware forces packaging to become system architecture, with HBM, GPU-to-GPU, optical I/O, power, and thermal all converging into one physical problem. The future AI package will not just be wider but deeper, and success will depend on making the vertical realization path trusted at scale. The next frontier is not a single material or device but the ability to control the entire vertical electromagnetic corridor.