Manufacturing Bits: June 30


1μm pitch wafer bonding At the recent IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC), Imec presented a paper on a fine-pitch hybrid wafer-to-wafer bonding technology for heterogeneous integration. Imec described a way to enable hybrid bond pitches down to 1μm using a novel Cu/SiCN (copper/silicon-carbon-nitrogen) surface topography. Today, the industry is developing or shi... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 23


Fan-out gas sensors At the recent IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC), the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Indian Institute of Science presented a paper on the development of a wearable MEMS gas sensor device based on a flexible wafer-level fan-out packaging technology. Researchers have demonstrated a gas sensor device or a personal environment... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 16


GaN power modules Gallium-nitride (GaN) devices are emerging in several markets, such as power semiconductors and RF. GaN, a binary III-V compound, is a wide-bandgap technology, meaning it is faster and more efficient than silicon-based devices. GaN has 10 times the breakdown field strength with double the electron mobility than silicon. Generally, some GaN vendors don’t use a traditio... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 10


Predicting warpage in packages At the recent IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in Las Vegas, there were several papers on ways to predict variation and warpage in IC packages. Advanced packages are prone to unwanted warpage during the process flow. The warpage challenges escalate as the packages become thinner. Warpage in turn can impact yields in IC packages. ... » read more

ECTC Packaging Trends


At the recent IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in Las Vegas, a number of packaging houses, R&D organizations and universities presented a slew of papers on the latest IC packaging technologies. The event provided a glimpse of the future of packaging, which is becoming more important in the industry. At one time, IC packaging took a backseat in the semiconductor... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 4


Chiplet printer A number of companies, R&D organizations and universities separately presented a slew of papers and technologies at the recent IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in Las Vegas. It’s difficult to write about all of the papers at ECTC. But one paper that stood out is a prototype chiplet micro-assembly printer developed by the Palo Alto Research Cente... » read more