VON ARDENNE has been depositing thin films on large, awkward substrates for decades, coating architectural glass, solar cells and even aircraft canopies. Now the Dresden-based company is bringing that experience to one of the hottest areas in semiconductor manufacturing: panel-level packaging. “With the advent of newer form factors like panel-level packaging, our tools are basically ready to do that,” said Guido Ueberreiter, VP of semiconductor strategy, who joined VON ARDENNE in 2025 after executive roles at GlobalFoundries and design work at AMD. The company, which he described as third-generation family owned, made its name in PVD, with e-beam and evaporation capabilities as well. In semiconductors, its bread and butter had long been special materials and MEMS. Getting metal into the holes At SEMICON West, VON ARDENNE announced it is applying HiPIMS (high-power impulse magnetron sputtering) on its HISS horizontal inline platform ( FIGURE 1 ) to deposit barrier and seed layers in through-glass vias (TGVs) on panels. As via pitches shrink and aspect ratios climb, conformal coating typically means ALD. “But when you want to be more cost efficient, you need to think about how you can use cheaper processes,” Ueberreiter said. “PVD is one of those answers, but you need to deploy some special tricks, and HiPIMS is one of them.” By pulsing the power supply that generates the plasma, HiPIMS drives ions into the hole for better sidewall and bottom coverage. Figure 1. The VON ARDENNE HISS horizontal coating platform. (© VON ARDENNE Corporate Archive) Because the industry hasn’t settled on a panel size, VON ARDENNE treats it as a carrier or tray design problem. Its tools can handle 310 x 310 mm, 510 x 515 mm and panels up to 650 x 650 mm. Inline instead of cluster Where most semiconductor deposition tools are cluster tools with chambers around a central transfer module, VON ARDENNE is pushing an inline approach: a panel enters the tool and travels through a series of process chambers without breaking vacuum. That boosts throughput and reduces handling, which Ueberreiter said is a major challenge on its own. “Very thin panels and very large form factors need increased reliability of just the handling, not even talking about the process,” he said. The chambers can be configured, and later reconfigured, for whatever stack a customer needs, such as titanium and titanium nitride followed by a copper seed. It’s an approach inherited from the PV and glass industries, where lines can be 100 meters long. “That’s where the Lego idea actually came from,” he said. “Since it’s actually a Lego building block system, let’s build a Lego set.” The company offers both horizontal (HISS) and vertical (VISS) inline configurations. No single supplier can solve panel processing alone, he added. VON ARDENNE is working with glass substrate suppliers and with companies that drill the vias, since how a sidewall is formed by laser or etch affects how well it can be coated. “It’s much more collaboration than isolation.” Glass adhesion is one of the biggest process challenges, and the company is investigating adhesion layers beyond the usual titanium and tantalum nitrides. When interposers go optical Ueberreiter sees a bigger opportunity further out. Once copper redistribution on panels is in high volume, he expects data links between chiplets to move to light. That calls for optical materials such as silicon oxide and silicon nitride for waveguides, or aluminum scandium nitride. VON ARDENNE already deposits these for precision optics, using in-situ optical monitoring to tune each layer as the stack grows. “Even if one atomic layer is a little out of bounds, you can repair it with the next iteration,” he said. “If somebody wants to do an optical interposer, we would be ready.” Editor’s note: In the interest of efficiency and timeliness, this article was drafted with the help of AI (Claude, from Anthropic), working from a recording of an interview arranged by Bodewe