Gold Innovations Blog » wire bonding

IMAPS – SEMI Wire bonding workshop

Richard Holliday — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:48:31 +0000

IMAPS and SEMI are running a Wire Bonding Workshop at SEMICON West. The objective of the Wire Bonding Workshop is to have a unique forum that brings together scientists, engineers, manufacturing, academia, and business people from around the world who have been working in the area of wire bonding. If you are interested in presenting at the event please see the event website here.

SEMICON China

Richard Holliday — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:38:12 +0000

World Gold Council, is helping to train engineers and chip designers in the technology of wire bonding. At next week’s SEMICON China 2010 we are sponsoring a seminar entitled ‘Materials Science of Wire Bonding & Wire Bond Reliability’ in conjunction with SEMI. This will include best practice in wire bonding technology and materials selection issues. To register for this seminar please click here.

Copper wire bonding – do the cost savings add up?

Richard Holliday — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:16:43 +0000

I’ve just received a copy of the new edition of George G. Harman’s book (or ‘bible’) Wire Bonding in Microelectronics. George is widely considered to be the world’s foremost authority on wire bonding. I’d like to quote a passage from the book which is relevant to the ‘gold versus copper’ bonding wire debate (which I blogged on last week).

” There is no question copper is a cheaper material but also one that brings new challenges to the bonding engineer. It may be a cost effective process in the eyes of a product manager but when the extra care and attention is required , it is weighed against the existing gold process and then we should ask ourselves, are the net savings worthwhile?”

Materials science of wire bonding

Richard Holliday — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:41:05 +0000

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.

Wire Bonding Workshop

Richard Holliday — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:15:22 +0000

The use of copper wire – as a replacement for gold wire – in the semiconductor wire bonding process, is a growing trend recently highlighted by both precious metals consultancy GFMS and electronics association SEMI in separate reports. The extent to which this trend continues will depend on a number of factors including the price of gold, improvements to the gold bonding wire process and the ability of the semiconductor supply chain to overcome the remaining technical challenges in using copper wire (eg slower bonding speeds). The very latest on the state of this ‘battle’ can be found at the forthcoming workshop on wire bonding by IMAPS.