The goal seems simple — share the model without sharing the process. A materials supplier shouldn’t have to reveal a proprietary formulation just so a customer can predict how it will behave in a package, and a foundry shouldn’t have to hand over its recipe to provide a useful model of a chiplet. But advanced packaging is making that separation much harder to maintain.

For years, engineers moved much of what they needed between companies through datasheets, design rules, and qualification specs, while the manufacturing knowledge stayed with the supplier. That arrangement held as long as the pieces behaved independently, but what one company keeps inside its process now shapes how another company’s part of the package performs once everything is assembled. The process may still belong to the supplier, but its consequences no longer end at the factory gate.

“There’s been some initial work on this challenge, but how do you insert a membrane between the companies so they can share a certain amount of data, but not all,” said Greg Prewitt, director of product management for Exensio Test Operations at PDF Solutions. “Do you obfuscate it? Do you normalize it? How much do you share so both teams can solve a problem without seeing any of the IP that’s proprietary to one company or another?”

The difficulty is deciding what that membrane should let through. Hide too little and the supplier gives away process knowledge it spent years developing. Hide too much and the model may lose the behavior, variation, or limits that the engineer on the other side needs to make a useful prediction.

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