Fifty years of Semicon Europa set a fitting backdrop for a conversation that feels both celebratory and unsentimental about the state of advanced packaging in Europe. We walk the floor in Munich and pull together a story that spans chemical metrology, panel plating, glass substrates, thermal materials, logistics resilience, and the push from R&D to production—plus a heartfelt goodbye.

Dena Mitchell, Nova opens the curtain on chemical metrology for electroplating, showing how bath health drives TSV fill, hybrid bond grain structure, and environmental wins through longer bath life. Sally Ann Henry, ACM Research, explains why horizontal panel electroplating can deliver better uniformity than vertical as panel-level packaging grows. Thomas Uhrmann, EV Group zooms out to the strategy: Europe’s strength in pilot lines and research consortia, the urgency to materialize large-scale packaging fabs, and how the EU Chips Act is knitting packaging into every node from photonics to logic.

Henkel's Ram Trichur takes on thermals, from kilowatt-class data center processors with backside power delivery to mobile’s shift from package-on-package to side-by-side for exposed die cooling, and the heat challenges inside HBM stacks. Comet's Isabella Drolz steps into glass panel territory with TGV inspection at 610 x 610 mm, aligning tools, standards, and timelines toward late-decade ramps. Martin Wynaendts van Resandt explains how
Lab14 brings agility with direct-write lithography for large substrates and optical interconnect masters—speeding iteration and trimming mask overhead as co-packaged optics advances. Jim Garstka, Shellback Semiconductor, talks about its Hydrozone product that is finding traction in photo mask cleaning.

We also get practical about moving all this innovation: Barry O'Dowd and Robin Knopf, of Kuehne+Nagel, detail how Europe’s packaging supply chains remain global, and how sea-air blends can cut cost and time for non-sensitive, high-volume flows while building resilience against disruptions. ASE's Patricia MacLeod, Christophe Zinck, and Bradford Factor tie it together with automotive realities—centralized compute, heterogeneous integration, reliability constraints—and the enduring role of MEMS and sensors to feed the brain of the car.

It’s a grounded, forward-looking journey through the technologies and decisions that will determine whether Europe turns its R&D leadership into production momentum. Listen for clear takeaways, candid perspectives, and a final toast to the community that made the 3D InCites Podcast possible.

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Europe’s chip future is being built in real time, and the view from Munich is electric. We sit down with IMEC’s leadership and ESMC’s founding CEO to unpack how pilot lines, a major Dresden fab, and the EU Chips Act are reshaping the continent’s strategy—from research to high-volume manufacturing. Along the way, we track the evolution of Semicon Europa over 50 years, from a supplier-centric expo to a convening force that brings equipment makers, materials leaders, device companies, and end users into one space.

Our guests open the hood on what resilience actually looks like: a 28 nm to 12 nm FinFET roadmap with integrated RRAM for microcontrollers, a half‑million‑wafers‑per‑year target, and a hiring plan that scales with purpose-built training in Dresden and Taiwan. On the R&D front, IMEC’s expanded pilot line infrastructure—fueled by multi‑billion‑euro investment—helps Europe retain technology leadership while translating breakthroughs into products. We also examine advanced packaging, where 3D integration and chiplet architectures blur the line between front end and back end and create fresh opportunities for automotive and industrial electronics.

The conversation gets candid on sovereignty versus interdependence. Full autarky is a myth; durable relevance comes from global collaboration, reverse dependencies, and focus on areas where Europe is indispensable—lithography, metrology, materials, and increasingly packaging and system design. We talk talent, too: why workforce visibility, skills pipelines, and on-the-job training will determine whether ambitious ramps hit their marks. If you care about semiconductors, policy, and the future of manufacturing in Europe, this is your inside track.

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A crowded server board with ten thousand parts doesn’t forgive sloppy inspection—and neither do pricey GPUs and chiplets. From the floor of Productronica in Munich, we dig into how automated optical inspection keeps advanced packages honest once they hit the PCB line, where solder quality, coplanarity, and sheer component variety can make or break yield. Vidya Vijay from Nordson Test & Inspection joins us to unpack why AOI remains the fastest path to actionable insight, when X‑ray is the smarter choice, and how new sensor design changes the game for reflective, high‑mix assemblies.

We explore the real pain points engineers face today: shiny dies that confuse cameras, BGAs packed with I/O where hidden defects hide under the body, and miniature passives that crowd tight keep‑outs. Vidya explains how three‑phase profilometry creates true 3D height maps by projecting fringe patterns and reading them from multiple angles, enabling precise checks for corner fill, underfill, and coplanarity. We also get into multi‑reflection suppression, Nordson’s approach to filtering glare and ghost images so the system sees the joint, not the noise. With true RGB on side cameras and higher resolution, AOI can now pick out tiny solder balls and subtle surface issues at speed—fuel for stronger AI autoprogramming and more reliable defect classification.

If throughput is king, data is queen. We talk about closing the loop from inspection back to the line to prevent bad lots—flagging stencil drift, placement offsets, and paste issues before they explode into scrap. Then we spotlight Nordson's launched SQ5000 Pro: faster cycle times, a wider field of view, and configurable 7 µm or 10 µm sensors designed for modern PCBA demands. Whether you’re chasing yield on high‑value GPUs or balancing AOI with AXI on dense boards, this conversation offers a practical roadmap for choosing the right tool, tackling reflectivity, and using insight to drive predictable quality.

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