Intel’s Former Advanced Packaging Chief Joins Nitride Global Board

WICHITA, KS, UNITED STATES, September 28, 2026 /CourierPR/ -- Dr. Babak Sabi, who previously led Intel’s Assembly and Test Technology Development (ATTD) as Senior Vice President and General Manager, has joined the board of advisors at Nitride Global, Inc. This move comes as the semiconductor industry faces a new bottleneck: packaging. According to industry reports through 2026, advanced packaging capacity is expected to become the binding constraint on AI accelerator supply, with leading 2.5D packaging lines already booked out well in advance.

Sabi’s extensive experience in advanced packaging development is seen as a significant asset for Nitride Global. His career, which began at Intel in 1984 and spanned over three decades, includes leading the Corporate Quality Network from 2002 to 2009, where he was responsible for product reliability and quality practices across the corporation. He also took the helm of ATTD in 2009, bringing the EMIB and Foveros architectures into production. Sabi holds a Ph.D. in solid state electronics from The Ohio State University and has authored ten papers on reliability physics, holds two patents, and received five Intel Achievement Awards. In 2022, he was inducted into the International Semiconductor Executive Summit Hall of Fame.

The appointment of Sabi underscores Nitride Global’s commitment to addressing the industry’s current challenges. The company’s aluminum oxynitride (AlON) technology is designed to serve multiple functions in advanced packaging, including substrate dielectric, gap fill between stacked die, passivation, and environmental barrier, as well as an optical layer at telecom wavelengths. The technology is deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering directly onto metals, silicon, sapphire, glass, and composite substrates, with no adhesion layer and at substrate temperatures below roughly 300 °C. The film can be applied in thicknesses from 100 nanometers to tens of microns, with measured refractive index values near 2.05 at 1310 nm.

Nitride Global’s AlON technology is particularly relevant as the industry’s limits are now set by the package, and increasingly by thermal and isolation constraints within it. Co-packaged optics, which move the optical engine onto the same substrate as the ASIC, are becoming essential to meet the demands of high-bandwidth data centers. However, these optics are more temperature-sensitive than the silicon they sit beside, with laser efficiency and wavelength stability degrading as temperature rises. Co-packaging places them on a shared interposer alongside a high-power ASIC, making heat removal a significant challenge. This problem is compounded by the limited domestic packaging capacity, with the United States projected to reach only about 10 percent of the global total by 2032.

Dr. Sabi’s expertise in qualification, reliability, and manufacturability will be invaluable as Nitride Global aims to bring its AlON technology to qualification and production. "We intend to earn it."