Europe’s semiconductor industry is preparing to put advanced packaging, chiplets and heterogeneous integration at the centre of its technology agenda as the SEMI 3D & Systems Summit returns to Dresden, Germany. Taking place from 17 to 19 June 2026, the event will bring together chipmakers, equipment suppliers, research institutes and technology developers to discuss the next generation of semiconductor system integration.

The summit will be held under the theme “Enabling Next-Gen Heterogeneous Systems Integration”, reflecting one of the most important shifts in chip manufacturing. As artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, automotive electronics and edge devices demand more computing power, packaging is no longer a secondary back-end process. It is becoming a key enabler of performance, energy efficiency and system scalability.

Advanced semiconductor packaging is increasingly important because traditional chip scaling alone is no longer enough to meet market needs. Instead of relying only on monolithic chips, the industry is moving toward chiplet architectures, where different functional blocks are combined inside advanced package structures. This allows designers to integrate processors, memory, sensors, photonics and specialised accelerators more flexibly.

Advanced packaging is becoming one of the strategic foundations of Europe’s semiconductor competitiveness, connecting chip design, manufacturing, interconnects and system-level innovation.

The Dresden programme will cover a wide range of topics, including AI hardware platforms, chiplet ecosystems, hybrid bonding, memory stacking, AR/VR devices, wearable intelligence and co-packaged optics. These areas are all connected by the same challenge: how to place more functionality into smaller, faster and more efficient systems.

Hybrid bonding will be one of the major technical themes. Die-to-wafer and wafer-to-wafer bonding technologies are being developed to enable higher-density connections between components, improving bandwidth and reducing power losses. These processes are especially relevant for advanced memory integration and AI accelerators, where data movement is often one of the biggest performance bottlenecks.

• Chiplet architectures enable more flexible system design and faster technology integration.
• Hybrid bonding supports high-density interconnects for advanced 3D integration.
• Co-packaged optics can improve data movement in AI and high-performance computing systems.
• European collaboration is essential to strengthen regional semiconductor capability.

Photonics and co-packaged optics will also feature heavily at the summit. As AI models and data centres require faster communication between processors, memory and networks, conventional electrical interconnects face increasing limitations. Optical technologies offer a pathway to move data more efficiently, reducing latency and energy consumption in future computing systems.

The event comes at a strategic moment for Europe. Geopolitical pressure, supply chain vulnerability and rising demand for AI-focused hardware have made semiconductors a priority for governments and industry. Advanced packaging is particularly important because it offers a way to increase system performance even when access to leading-edge fabrication capacity is limited or highly competitive.

The speaker lineup is expected to include representatives from major industry and research organisations, including ASML, GlobalFoundries, NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics, imec and CEA-Leti. Their participation reflects the broad ecosystem required to make heterogeneous integration work, from lithography and wafer processing to design, bonding, test and final package assembly.

Dresden is a fitting location for the event. The city is one of Europe’s most important semiconductor hubs, with a strong base of manufacturing, research and supplier activity. Hosting the summit there reinforces the region’s ambition to play a larger role in next-generation chip packaging and system integration technologies.

Alongside the summit, SEMI Europe has opened the call for abstracts for its 2026 Advanced Packaging Conference. That event will focus on power and interconnect innovations for AI systems, high-performance computing, automotive and edge applications, showing that packaging-related innovation will remain a central topic beyond the Dresden meeting.

For the broader packaging industry, semiconductor packaging offers an important reminder that packaging can be a performance technology, not only a protective layer. In chips, the package determines how components communicate, how heat is managed and how systems scale. As AI hardware becomes more complex, advanced packaging will be one of the fields where competitiveness is decided.

The SEMI 3D & Systems Summit 2026 will therefore serve as more than a technical conference. It will be a signal of how Europe intends to strengthen its semiconductor ecosystem through collaboration, investment and innovation in advanced packaging. The technologies discussed in Dresden will help shape the future of AI hardware, data centres, automotive electronics and connected devices.