Advanced Chip and Circuit Materials (ACCM) has announced a major expansion of its U.S. manufacturing capacity for its Celeritas family of advanced dielectric materials, the insulating materials used in circuit boards and chip packages. The expansion covers four segments of AI hardware where material supply and performance currently constrain system design: ultra-high-speed skew-free materials, low- and negative-expansion laminates for large accelerator boards, IC substrate and package core materials, and build-up materials.
At ACCM's Wisconsin facility, new laminate capacity of 20 million square feet per year comes online in January 2027, while prepreg and build-up material capacity, meaning pre-impregnated layers and layered insulating films used in constructing circuit boards and chip packages, will reach 87 million square feet per year in November 2026. Larger expansions of both are slated for the second half of 2027. All of this capacity is based in the United States, running on a raw material supply chain independent of the conventional copper-clad laminate supply chain, supporting fast lead times of typically about three weeks.
The expansion covers several Celeritas products. Celeritas SF1600 is an ultra-low-loss material with no woven glass reinforcement, which eliminates glass-weave skew, a timing distortion caused by uneven glass fiber patterns, and the need for artwork rotation on 224G-class switch and backplane designs. Celeritas HM001 is a near-zero coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), high-modulus, ultra-low-loss laminate engineered as a matched pair with SF1600 for large system-on-chip and accelerator boards. The expansion also includes package core materials designed to control CTE and warpage, including Celeritas HM50, which has a negative in-plane CTE to control warpage in large-body chip packages, and Celeritas SMC, a silicon-matched core whose CTE matches that of silicon itself. Finally, it includes Celeritas BU++, an extremely low-loss build-up material that can be processed through both build-up film vacuum lamination and standard hot-press lamination process flows.
None of these materials depends on T-glass or quartz fabric, both specialty reinforcement materials that are currently supply-constrained. The materials are also halogen-free and PFAS-free, and all can run on the same lamination, drilling, and plating equipment that circuit board fabricators already use today.
Tarun Amla, president and CEO of ACCM, said the materials limiting AI compute and networking systems are constrained on supply, on performance, or in many cases both. He said designers currently have to contend not only with technology challenges for emerging applications but also with supply constraints on existing programs, and that ACCM's capacity expansion lets designers address both sets of challenges. He said the capacity is coming online in the United States for materials that solve today's supply problems and tomorrow's performance needs.
Alongside the capacity expansion, ACCM's second materials characterization laboratory will come online at its La Crosse, Wisconsin facility in October 2026.
