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IDTechEx Discusses Ag Sintering and Cu Sintering

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BOSTON, June 5, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Thermal management for EV power electronics has long posed significant challenges. The ongoing shift from Si IGBT and SiC MOSFET to potentially GaN HEMT in the future results in higher junction temperatures and increased demand for die-attach materials in EV power modules. In traditional Si IGBT power modules, die-attach materials like Pb95Sn5 and Pb92.5Sn5Ag2.5 struggle to meet reliability requirements for packaging power devices in high-temperature applications due to creep-fatigue concerns. Additionally, substrate-attach materials such as Sn96.5Ag3Cu0.5, with lower melting temperatures than solder used for die attachment, further constrain the reliability of SiC power modules for high-temperature applications. These challenges drive the market toward silver sinter materials, with the potential to extend to copper sinter materials, offering cost reductions.

Despite cost advantages, the IDTechEx report “Thermal Management for EV Power Electronics 2024-2034: Forecasts, Technologies, Markets, and Trends” identifies barriers hindering the widespread commercialization of copper sintering, such as challenging manufacturing environments due to copper oxidation and comparable or even higher costs than silver sintering as of early 2024 due to smaller commercialization scales.

Conventional die-attach and substrate-attach materials typically consist of solder alloys, featuring bondline thicknesses ranging from 50 to 100µm for die attachment and 100 to 150µm for substrate attachment. Despite their satisfactory performance, IDTechEx observes a growing preference for Ag sintering, driven by major automotive OEMs like Tesla, BYD, and Hyundai. Compared to traditional solder alloys, Ag sintering offers higher thermal conductivity (between 200 and 300W/mK), potentially reducing thermal resistance from junction to case by over 40%, along with significantly higher melting points and decreased electrical resistivity.

With the adoption of SiC MOSFETs, IDTechEx forecasts that Ag sintering will capture nearly or over 50% market share in regions like China in the near future, presenting significant market opportunities for thermal material suppliers.

Much of the available sintered Ag on the market requires pressure during sintering to enhance bond characteristics and reduce porosity, significantly reducing sintering time. However, this approach has drawbacks, including decreased yield and efficiency for bonding multiple chips, especially with complex architecture. Further, it also requires additional steps and machines, leading to higher costs. Therefore, manufacturers tend to avoid this and wait for solutions that are easy to implement in their already existing infrastructure: pressure-less sintering. Pressure-less sintering offers lower cost barriers and benefits in sinter-bonding multiple chips but is reliable only for surfaces with areas between 4 and 25mm2. More details about the pressure-less sintering process are included in IDTechEx’s report, ‘Thermal Management for EV Power Electronics 2024-2034: Forecasts, Technologies, Markets, and Trends’.

The cost of Ag sintering can vary significantly based on factors like customer relationships, order volumes, and suppliers. Ag sintered paste costs can easily be five to ten times higher than solder alloys. For instance, IDTechEx learned of an Ag sintered paste developed by a Japanese company costing around US$2-3/g, though this price has the potential to decrease significantly with increased volume and other material properties. Another supplier suggests that its sintered silver paste costs around US$1,400/kg. Overall, driven by leading automotive players, there is a discernible trend toward replacing solder alloys with Ag sintering pastes, creating market opportunities for material suppliers.

Cu sintering is proposed as an alternative approach to address the cost factor. Compared to Ag sintering, Cu sintering aims to offer similar performance at a lower cost. A supplier informed IDTechEx that Cu sintering technology can cost as little as half as much as Ag sintering technology. However, oxidation remains a significant challenge for Cu sintering. Therefore, a combination of a controlled atmosphere and reducing solvent/binders is the focus on the production of reliable materials. Cu sintering pastes have pressure and pessure-less variants under N2 or H2. However, this presents challenges during processing, leading to concerns around reliability.

IDTechEx is not aware of any automaker using Cu sintered materials as of early 2024, but given the historic timeline for Ag sintering adoption, IDTechEx forecasts that the large-scale commercialization will happen within five years and potentially as soon as late 2024 or early 2025.

IDTechEx’s ‘Thermal Management for EV Power Electronics 2024-2034’ provides a comprehensive overview of Ag and Cu sintering technologies market opportunities, competitive landscapes, supply chains, and key players in the substrate-attach and die-attach sectors. To find out more about this report, including downloadable sample pages, please see www.IDTechEx.com/TMPE.

IDTechEx has also published a report on thermal interface materials, which includes details on die-attach and TIM2s for other emerging applications, including advanced driver-assisted systems (ADAS), 5G, data center semiconductors, EV batteries, and consumer electronics. To find out more about this report, including downloadable sample pages, please see www.IDTechEx.com/TIM.

For the full portfolio of thermal management market research from IDTechEx, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/Research/Thermal.

About IDTechEx:

IDTechEx provides trusted independent research on emerging technologies and their markets. Since 1999, we have been helping our clients to understand new technologies, their supply chains, market requirements, opportunities and forecasts. For more information, contact research@IDTechEx.com or visit www.IDTechEx.com.

Media Contact:
Lucy Rogers
Sales and Marketing Administrator
press@IDTechEx.com
+44(0)1223 812300

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Air Products to Expand Industrial Gas Supply for Samsung Electronics’ Next-Generation Semiconductor Fab in South Korea

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New investment underscores the company’s long-term commitment to Korea and its leading role in the global semiconductor industry 

LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa., April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Air Products (NYSE:APD), a world-leading industrial gases company and serving Samsung globally, today announced it has been selected by Samsung to supply industrial gases for its new advanced semiconductor fab in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.

Under the agreement, Air Products will build, own and operate multiple state-of-the-art production facilities and a bulk specialty gas supply system to supply nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and hydrogen for Samsung’s new semiconductor fab. The new facilities are expected to come onstream in multiple phases from 2028 through 2030.

Air Products has a long track record of executing multiple phase expansions in Pyeongtaek to support Samsung’s growing manufacturing needs. This latest project represents Air Products’ largest investment to date in the semiconductor industry and will establish Pyeongtaek as the company’s single largest operations site globally supporting the electronics industry. 

“Air Products is honored to be selected once again by Samsung and to have their continued confidence as a trusted partner supporting their strategic growth plans,” said SR Kim, President, Air Products Korea. “This significant investment reinforces Air Products’ role as a leading global supplier to the semiconductor industry and underscores our long-standing commitment to supporting our strategic customers with safety, reliability, efficiency and excellent service.”

Air Products has served the global electronics industry for more than 40 years, supplying industrial gases safely and reliably to many of the world’s leading technology companies. The company has operated in Korea for more than 50 years and has established a strong position in electronics and manufacturing sectors.

About Air Products

Air Products (NYSE: APD) is a world-leading industrial gases company in operation for over 85 years focused on serving energy, environmental, and emerging markets and generating a cleaner future. The Company supplies essential industrial gases, related equipment and applications expertise to customers in dozens of industries, including refining, chemicals, metals, electronics, manufacturing, medical and food. As the leading global supplier of hydrogen, Air Products also develops, engineers, builds, owns and operates some of the world’s largest clean hydrogen projects, supporting the transition to low- and zero-carbon energy in the industrial and heavy-duty transportation sectors. Through its sale of equipment businesses, the Company also provides turbomachinery, membrane systems and cryogenic containers globally.

Air Products had fiscal 2025 sales of $12 billion from operations in approximately 50 countries. For more information, visit airproducts.com or follow us on LinkedInXFacebook or Instagram.

This release contains “forward-looking statements” within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management’s expectations and assumptions as of the date of this release and are not guarantees of future performance. While forward-looking statements are made in good faith and based on assumptions, expectations and projections that management believes are reasonable based on currently available information, actual performance and financial results may differ materially from projections and estimates expressed in the forward-looking statements because of many factors, including the risk factors described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 and other factors disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we disclaim any obligation or undertaking to update or revise any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in the assumptions, beliefs or expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances upon which any such forward-looking statements are based.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/air-products-to-expand-industrial-gas-supply-for-samsung-electronics-next-generation-semiconductor-fab-in-south-korea-302757497.html

SOURCE Air Products

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