It is our pleasure to invite you to the fiifth UCLA CHIPS Symposium on Thursday Dec. 4th, 2025. This marks our 10th anniversary, during which time we have had a significant impact on the trajectory of advanced packaging. At our inaugural symposium in 2015, we outlined our strategy for advanced packaging – the concept of chiplets, large substrates, fine pitch assembly, flexible bio-compatible packaging platforms, and analog in-memory compute using conventional CMOS. Over the last ten years we have implemented these concepts with widespread industry adoption. Today, the developments in wafer scale systems and 3D stacking ,build on pioneering contributions from our students and scholars. This Symposium is dedicated to the memory of Prof. King Ning Tu, who passed away in August this year after a career of seminal contributions to our understanding of packaging and interconnect science.

Throughout, we have stayed true to the belief that our most important product is our students and scholars. We have graduated about 20 doctoral students and an equal number of master students in this time. These graduates and scholars are making a significant impact in our industry and academia across the world. We have also provided valuable lab and research experience to tens of undergraduate students. Our students come from several disciplines highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of our work.

The theme of our fifth Symposium is "Scale-down and Scale-out of advanced packaging". This is what drives new developments, especially in the ever-growing application of AI hardware.

UCLA Engineering Dean, Alissa Park, will explain how our vision for the school is adapting to changes in the funding realities that we are experiencing. This will be followed by a technical expose on some key topics by industry leaders: The evolution of 3D memory from Micron, GlobalFoundries' advanced packaging strategy by Ted Letavic,  the exciting developments at TIE by S.V. Srinivasan, Amkor's reshoring efforts in Arizona by David McCann, how Synopsis is adapting their tools for advanced packaging by Abhijeet Chakraborty among others. As packaging grows at UCLA, we are happy to showcase the contributions of our most recent  faculty hire, Tiwei Wei. The exciting  panel discussion this year will feature the performers of the NAPMP NoFO1, moderated by  Boris Vaisband (now at UCI). Finally, the highlight of the symposium will be the poster session by our students, hosted by KNS, the global leader in advanced TCB and assembly equipment.

Symposium registration is required as space is limited. A registration link and agenda for the symposium are available here. We will also be publishing the 2025  addendum to the "Chipavad Gita" - the UCLA CHIPS complete collection of works.

The meeting will be held in the Mong Auditorium at UCLA. Instructions for arrival and parking are available here. We look forward to seeing you at the symposium.

Subramanian Iyer

Director, UCLA CHIPS