Flex Connections: Material Selection in Nickel vs. Copper Tabs
Flex Connections: Four Lessons in Engineering Judgment for PCB Designers
Flexible Thinking: ‘Let There Be Light’–Emitting Diodes!
Advanced Chip and Circuit Materials, Inc. (ACCM) announced a major expansion of its US manufacturing capacity for the Celeritas® family of advanced dielectric materials, covering the four segments of AI hardware where material supply and performance currently constrain system design: ultra-high-speed skew-free materials, low- and negative-expansion laminates for large accelerator boards, IC substrate/package core materials, and build-up materials.
New laminate capacity of 20 million square feet per year comes online in January 2027. Prepreg and build-up capacity will be at 87 million square feet per year in November 2026. Larger expansions for both are slated for the 2nd half of 2027. All capacity is US-based, on a raw material supply chain independent of the conventional copper-clad laminate chain, supporting fast lead times, typically three weeks.
The expansion covers Celeritas SF1600, an ultra-low-loss material with no woven glass reinforcement, eliminating glass-weave skew and artwork rotation on 224G-class switch and backplane designs; Celeritas HM001, a near-zero-CTE, high-modulus ultra-low-loss laminate engineered as a matched pair with SF1600 for large SoC and accelerator boards; package core materials for CTE and warpage control, including Celeritas HM50 with negative in-plane CTE for warpage control in large-body packages and Celeritas SMC (silicon-matched core) with CTE that matches silicon; and Celeritas BU++, an extremely low-loss build-up material that processes in build-up film vacuum lamination process flows, as well as standard hot-press lamination process flows. None of these materials depends on T-glass, or quartz fabric. They are halogen-free and PFAS-free, and all run on the same lamination, drilling, and plating equipment fabricators use today.
“The materials limiting AI compute and networking systems are supply-constrained, performance-constrained, or, in many cases, both,” said Tarun Amla, PhD, President and CEO of ACCM. “In the current environment, designers are having to contend not only with trying to address technology challenges for emerging applications, but also supply constraints on current programs. ACCM’s capacity expansion allows designers to address both sets of challenges. The capacity is coming online, in the United States, for materials that solve today’s supply and tomorrow’s performance.”
Alongside the capacity expansion, ACCM’s 2nd materials characterization laboratory will come online in the La Crosse, Wisconsin facility in October 2026.
