Nepcon West '99 Roundup
John Baliga, Associate Editor -- Semiconductor International, 4/1/1999
Tessera (San Jose, Calif.) licensed its µBGA
technology to Siliconware Precision Industries Ltd. (SPIL,
Taichung, Taiwan).
ChipPAC (Santa Clara, Calif.) opened a 3,000 sq.ft.
packaging development center to let companies evaluate BGA/CSP packaging
options and get prototypes within five days.
Texas Instruments' Interconnection Business
(Mansfield, Mass.) announced the availability of a family of burn-in test
sockets for Direct Rambus(TM) memory devices.
ASM Pacific Technology Ltd. (Hong Kong) received an
$8.9 million order for back-end equipment from a U.S. semiconductor
manufacturer for a new Asian factory.
International Flex Technologies (IFT, Endicott,
N.Y.), a newly-formed company, purchased the fine-line flexible circuit
business unit from IBM, located in Endicott, New York. IFT will
retain ~100 of the former IBM employees.
Intarsia Corp. (Fremont, Calif.) acquired the
UK-based RF Multi-Chip Module team and its integrated passive technology
from Mitel Semiconductor (Kanata, Ontario, Canada).
Cadence Design Systems (San Jose, Calif.) and
Pacific Numerix Corp. (Scottsdale, Ariz.) announced an agreement to
deliver an integrated solution for high-performance package designers. It
is intended to let customers perform high-speed package analysis at any
point in the design process without the need for constant oversight by a
signal-integrity engineer.
HIG Capital Management (Miami, Fla.) acquired
Cofer Corp. (San Jose, Calif.), which is being merged with
Surface Mount Taping Corp. (SMT, Austin, Texas).
California Micro Devices (CAMD, Milpitas, Calif.)
made a licensing agreement with Flip Chip Technologies (FCT,
Phoenix, Ariz.) to use FCT's Ultra CSP manufacturing technology.
Amkor Technology (Chandler, Ariz.) announced plans
to double production capacity of µBGA packages by mid-1999 to six million
units per month.
Nepcon West
'99 had many board assembly and packaging technologies on display, and two major
semiconductor packaging trends were apparent. One is a large shift by board
assembly equipment suppliers into advanced packaging markets. The other is a
shift toward making flip chip packaging cheaper.
Company News
One reason for board assembly suppliers to move toward advanced packaging is more growth potential. Also, advanced packaging has been leveraging board assembly technology to a larger degree.
Speedline Technologies (Franklin, Mass.) revealed that it is moving toward the advanced packaging markets to diversify. The company presented its MPM WP-1 wafer bumping printer, CAMALOT Matrixx BGA ball placement system, and its ACCEL MicroPro BGA reflow and cleaning system, among others.
Universal Instruments (Binghamton, N.Y.) had acquired Alphasem (Berg, Switzerland) to strengthen its position in the advanced packaging arena. The company's new GSMxs machine places components, including regular and flip chip die, just as well as its GSMx, while using half the footprint.
Kulicke & Soffa (K&S, Willow Grove, Pa.) also announced some strategic moves just prior to the show. It bought the X-LAM technology for BGA substrates, daughter cards and multi-layer boards from the now defunct MicroModule Systems (Cupertino, Calif.). K&S also formed a joint venture with Polyset, Inc. (Mechanicsville, N.Y.) called Advanced Polymer Solutions (APS, Willow Grove, Pa.), to produce underfill, liquid encapsulant and die attach adhesive materials using 'novel chemistry.'
Quad Systems (Willow Grove, Pa.) introduced an automatic wafer transfer option for its APS-1 pick and place machine. The company also demonstrated its new flip chip process, developed with Emerson & Cuming (Billerica, Mass.), using Emerson & Cuming's AMICON E no-flow fluxing underfill material (see last month's Assembly & Packaging page).
Alpha Metals (Jersey City, NJ) presented its own work on no flow underfilling in the technical conference. The work focused on pre-dispensed solid underfill materials and examined different ways of fluxing.
Papers in the technical conference presented a number of advancements in materials. Epoxy Technology (Billerica, Mass.) presented a study of boron nitride (BN) filled die bond epoxies. They show promise of higher thermal conductivity, but large particle sizes can easily cause voids, especially for very thin bond lines.
DELO Industrieklebstoffe GmbH & Co. KG (Lech, Germany) presented results on its photoinitiated adhesives for smart card applications. The materials eliminate the need for heat curing, and their performance is becoming comparable to conventional materials.
Thermoset (Indianapolis, Ind.) presented its Gelease product, a hybrid between a thermal grease and a silicone gel. It is designed to give the dispensing and wetting properties of a grease and the resistance to moisture and pump-out of a polymer. The company's tests show thermal conductivities in the 3 W/m-K range.
