Nitride Global adds ex-Intel packaging chief Babak Sabi to advisory board

Nitride Global named former Intel packaging leader Dr. Babak Sabi to its Board of Advisors as advanced packaging and thermal constraints become central bottlenecks in AI and networking hardware. The move gives the Wichita-based materials company an industry veteran with deep reliability and manufacturability experience as it pushes its AlON dielectric toward qualification and production.

Why it matters: - Advanced packaging has become a limiting factor for AI accelerators and high-speed networking, making materials qualification and manufacturability more important to chip performance than ever. - Nitride Global is positioning its aluminum oxynitride, or AlON, as a multi-function material that could reduce interfaces, improve thermal behavior and support both electrical and optical functions in advanced packages. - Dr. Babak Sabi brings decades of Intel packaging and reliability experience to a category where production credibility can matter as much as lab performance.

What happened: - Nitride Global announced that Dr. Babak Sabi has joined its Board of Advisors. - Sabi previously served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Assembly and Test Technology Development at Intel, the organization responsible for Intel’s packaging, assembly and test process technology. - Intel’s ATTD group brought the EMIB and Foveros architectures into production. - Nitride Global is headquartered in Wichita, Kansas.

The details: - Sabi joined Intel in 1984 and spent more than three decades at the company. - He led Intel’s Corporate Quality Network from 2002 to 2009, with responsibility for product reliability and quality practices across the company. - Intel named him to lead ATTD in 2009. - Sabi holds a Ph.D. in solid state electronics from The Ohio State University. - He has authored ten papers on reliability physics and holds two patents. - He received five Intel Achievement Awards and was inducted into the International Semiconductor Executive Summit Hall of Fame in 2022. - Nitride Global says AlON is a dense, amorphous, conformal dielectric deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering directly onto metals, silicon, sapphire, glass and composite substrates. - The company says the process requires no adhesion layer, runs at substrate temperatures below roughly 300 °C and can produce films from 100 nanometers to tens of microns thick. - Nitride Global says the film bonds chemically to the surface, which avoids the thermal resistance and delamination risk of a separate bonded interface. - The company says one deposited film can function as substrate dielectric, conformal gap fill, passivation and environmental barrier, and an optical layer at telecom wavelengths. - Nitride Global says measured refractive index values are near 2.05 at 1310 nm. - The company says low deposition temperature allows application to assemblies and organic constructions that ceramic processing would damage. - Nitride Global also develops ultra-wide bandgap aluminum nitride semiconductor substrates. - The company says it is one of only four companies worldwide with AlN crystal growth expertise and the only remaining fully domestically owned one. - Nitride Global says it holds exclusive global rights within the electronics industry to AlON/AlN magnetron sputtering deposition technology developed jointly with the Fraunhofer FEP Institute. - The company’s website is more information. - Nitride Global also linked its LinkedIn page.

Between the lines: - The announcement is as much a credibility signal as a personnel move. Sabi’s background in reliability, quality and volume manufacturing speaks directly to the question of whether a new material can move from technical promise to production use. - The pitch for AlON fits a broader industry shift toward fewer interfaces, lower thermal resistance and more integrated optical-electrical packaging. - The company is also leaning on a domestic-supply argument at a time when U.S. packaging capacity remains limited.

What's next: - Nitride Global said Sabi will help guide the company toward qualification and production. - The company is trying to convert AlON from a multi-function materials claim into a manufacturable package component. - The broader market will keep pushing for packaging technologies that can handle heat, isolation and optical integration as AI and networking systems scale.