A 1980s-era semiconductor fab in Austin, Texas, is getting a makeover. The Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE), as it’s called now, is tooling up to become the only advanced packaging plant in the world that is dedicated to 3D heterogenous integration (3DHI)—the stacking of chips made of multiple materials, both silicon and non-silicon. The fab is the infrastructure behind DARPA’s Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing (NGMM) program. “NGMM is focused on a revolution in microelectronic...