Posts Tagged ‘reliability’
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January 29th, 2010
Concerns over shift from gold to copper bonding wire
There has been a lot of media coverage (see here and here for examples) of this week’s announcement of the results of a survey, conducted by SEMI, the global semiconductor industry association, which shows the semiconductor industry has serious reservations about the reliability and yield of copper bonding wire.
This global survey does show that an increasing number of companies are considering using copper for some new products – but the results of this survey show that there are still serious reservations in the industry over the use of copper wire in packaging technology. It is clear that gold has proven reliability and a track record – industry professionals still recognise this. We plan to undertake further research to discover the extent of the difference in reliability of gold versus copper over the coming months……
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January 4th, 2010
Materials science of wire bonding
Wire bonding remains the most important interconnection technology in semiconductor packaging. It also happens to be the single largest industrial use of gold. Whilst lots has been written about the wire bonding process itself, much less has been written about the materials science of the technology. This latest paper in Microelectronics Reliability by Chris Breach and Frank Wulff takes a look at this area, including how the reliability of the ball bonding process is affected by selection of gold or copper wire. -
November 4th, 2009
The High Reliability Choice in Semiconductor Packaging
The reliability of gold in microelectronic packaging makes it the standard, by which all other materials must be judged. Even though the price of gold has risen significantly in this decade the usage of gold in microelectronic packaging has continued to grow as efforts to make the most cost-effective usage of gold through spot plating, plating thickness reduction and the usage of thinner bonding wire have been successful. Gold wire remains the main wire material for ball bonding in microelectronics assembly and has proven reliable in billions of devices over many years. However, high gold prices are increasingly forcing a shift towards cheaper copper wire, despite concerns over reliability. Today, in a paper with Lee Levine of Process Solutions Consulting at IMAPS 2009 we will be explaining that there is a need to obtain higher quality reliability data with gold and copper wires supported by state of the art analytical methods. This will help quantify and validate the relative merits of the two metals in this critical application. We also point out that design-for-recycling should also be an important consideration in material selection. The precious metals (mainly gold) constitute a very substantial proportion of the material value of waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) and gold can be considered as a key component of the economic viability of WEEE recycling.
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August 27th, 2009
Gold: The High Reliability Choice in Semiconductor Packaging
At the IMAPS 2009 event, there is a special invited session on Intelligent Uses of Precious Metals in Microelectronics. With Lee Levine from Process Solutions Consulting, I’ll be presenting the case for why gold remains the high reliability choice in semiconductor packaging, a summary of which appears here.
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July 22nd, 2009
The indestructible mobile
One of the quirky stories in the UK newspapers over the last few days has been this piece about the new ‘indestructible’ phone from Sonim. For £250 you get a device that will withstand temperatures of -20 Celsius, can be submerged in water and will survive being dropped on to concrete from a height of 6ft. Pretty impressive.
This story got me thinking about the use of gold in mobile phones. Gold is used in number of components in mobiles/cell phones, including as a coating material on the contacts (battery charging area, SIM contacts etc) and in the form of gold bonding wire in the device’s chips. In each case, there are nominally lower cost alternative materials available, but gold remains the material of choice. Why? Well, as the Sonim phone admirably demonstrates, reliability is a key consumer requirement and materials don’t come more reliable than gold. You don’t want a chip to fail or a contact to be unreliable, so you use gold to perform key functions in the product. That’s why I’d be amazed in the Sonim phone didn’t contain gold.
Richard Holliday
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