OGM, Maybe some late short covering on friday.. BTW here's CEO Keller's description of how flip chips are attached to a flexible substrate to make "flex circuitry". If you'd like a more technical description of the process go to Delco Electronics/Kulicke & Sofa's Site at: flipchip.com
From Keller's interview today...
Keller: When you think about integrated circuit packaging, the best description I can give you is look inside your computer and you see all those ceramic little hard black squares in there with steel legs coming out of them. That's really an integrated circuit packaged in ceramic and the purpose of the packaging is to get that integrated circuit to communicate to the outside world. So, you get all those lines and everything built into that circuit so it can talk to the outside world. Right now the bulk of it is ceramic. You take integrated circuits, you encase it in ceramic, and then you use the little legs on the ceramic to plug it in and get signal to it and from it.
What you're looking for in using a flexible circuit for packaging is as the lines and spaces get closer and closer together they start generating a lot more heat. Some of the ceramics start breaking down because of the heat that's being generated. So, number one, you're looking for heat dissipation. Number two, you're looking for a smaller way to package it. Those big ceramic chips when you get them into a small pager, cell phone or whatever, you don't want to put too many big ceramic chips in there.
So, what we're looking at doing is making the flexible circuit for use in packaging applications. So, what you would do is take the integrated circuit and then mount it directly on to the flexible circuit. The flexible circuit will help dissipate the heat better than the ceramic does right now. Also, the flexible circuit can be what connects the integrated circuit to the outside world. So, you aren't increasing the amount of space that you take up, since it's not much bigger than what the integrated circuit is itself.
And that's what I mean by the real benefit of moving towards the flexible circuit packaging versus the ceramic packaging. It's looking like there have been some flexible circuits used in packaging applications in the past and they've been really a different design from what people are going to be looking at going forward. Going forward, they're looking at more dense flexible circuits, more lines and spaces built into that flexible circuit.
That's really the type of thing that we do, using our volume flexible circuit facility right now. So, the one thing I want to make clear is that when we talk about the HIF and the FSA, the real core to those products is a very high-end flexible circuitry. When you talk about chip packaging applications, it's the same thing -- very high-end circuit products. We can utilize the same manufacturing facility, the same equipment to make those products with very few modifications.
You can use the same equipment to make different flexible circuits by just changing the photo tool. Of course, I'm oversimplifying. But in general it's really not that difficult for us to convert a line from making an HIF and also the HIF portion of an FSA over to making a chip packaging application. Both of them are high volume products and both of them are very high-technology flexible circuits. |
