The era in which plastic substrates can no longer handle the heat generated by AI chips has arrived. The glass substrate market is projected to grow to roughly $4.2 billion (about KRW 6 trillion) by 2034, and BOE has now entered the race. BOE brought the pilot line it invested in back in 2024 online within just two years, and in May signed a packaging and optical-interconnect development agreement with US-based Corning.
The logic that bigger chips demand higher heat-dissipation and flatness requirements from the substrate is fundamentally similar to the cell up-sizing and energy-density race the battery industry is going through. Another parallel: when a single material changes, the entire set of equipment that handles it has to be redesigned.
Because of its brittleness, glass substrate carries a far higher risk of breakage during transfer and processing than plastic does. The handling and alignment mechanism design know-how needed to solve this problem is likely to overlap with the know-how used to handle thin electrode sheets in the battery electrode process.