CoWoS / advanced packaging

CoWoS is the specific advanced-packaging recipe behind the broader capacity constraint — a method for placing logic and memory side by side on a shared silicon interposer so they can talk at the enormous bandwidths modern accelerators need. Where 'packaging capacity' is the general gate, CoWoS is the concrete technique, and it is the exact process accelerator makers cite by name when they explain why they cannot ship more. That specificity is what turns a manufacturing recipe into an industry chokepoint.

If CoWoS tightens, the pinch usually traces to the interposer or the substrate underneath it, and any shortfall there caps advanced-package output no matter what else is available. The exposure is unusually concentrated: TSMC dominates the process itself, while the surrounding equipment and materials makers — BE Semiconductor, Disco, Onto Innovation, Tokyo Electron and Unimicron — hold the leverage that comes from supplying a step almost no one else can perform at scale.