Consortium aims to accelerate 300-mm wafer-level IC packaging
By Mark LaPedus
Semiconductor Business News
(09/13/00, 11:35:33 AM EDT)
TAIPEI -- During the Semicon Taiwan conference here today, a group of semiconductor-production equipment and materials suppliers today launched a new industry consortium aimed at developing advanced wafer-bumping and wafer-level packaging technologies for 300-mm silicon substrates.
The consortium, called the Semiconductor Equipment Consortium for Advanced Packaging (SECAP), includes Image Technology, Karl Suss, Semitool, Unaxis (formerly Balzers Process Systems), and the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM. Organizers of SECAP said the group will enable member companies to share data, define process and tool interfaces, and jointly develop roadmaps for advanced bumping and wafer-level packaging technologies.
The Fraunhofer Institute, a research and development organization in Berlin, Germany, will set up an application process center for the consortium.
"The first step [for SECAP] is to work on 300-mm wafer technologies," said Dietrich Toennies, international product manager for Karl Suss, a chip-production equipment supplier based in Munich.
The consortium hopes to solve several hurdles in the back-end portion of 300-mm wafer processing, he said in an interview with SBN at Semicon Taiwan. "This consortium will benefit our customers, because it will harmonize the ifferent types of systems and processes used for advanced packaging," hesaid.
Karl Suss itself claims to be the world's leading supplier of mask aligners for advanced bumping and wafer-level packaging technologies. "It's a different application for lithography than DRAMs and microprocessors," said Dirk Rothweiler, director of marketing and sales for Karl Suss, in an interview at the Taiwan trade show. "We are not competing against ASM Lithography, Nikon, or Canon," he added.
At present, Karl Suss' business "is booming in Asia," said Rothweiler, who is also the managing director of the company's Asia-Pacific subsidiary, Karl Suss Asia Co. Ltd., based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Taiwan is the largest market for the company in Asia outside of Japan, followed by Korea, and Singapore, he said. |
