Historically, a rite of passage for a semiconductor packaging professional was the realization that packaging was an afterthought or seen as a necessary evil-or worse-in the IC world. Packaging added cost and leadtime, and more often than not it ruined some perfectly good chips.
I was spoiled early in my packaging career when I worked on a project in which we were able to provide input on what metallization in a chip should look like to resist the stresses induced by encapsulation. It seemed perfectly sensible to me that this would be typical, since packaging was an important part of the total manufacturing flow.
I learned, though, that products were typically “thrown over the wall” to packaging long after the point where useful input could be provided. Similarly, any reliability issues or field failures were the problem of the packaging group. The industry as a whole has suffered because of this front-end vs. back-end segmentation.
We are now faced with another chance to do this properly, with the boom in optoelectronics. It is early enough in the lifecycle of this emerging industry for packaging to take a leading role in pushing it ahead. We need to make sure that the design and manufacture of these devices are done in conjunction with the packaging of them. There should be plenty of ways that the optoelectronics industry can benefit from involving and fully leveraging advanced packaging capabilities early in the process.
The packaging industry has shown what it can do-compare your current cell phone to the state-of-the-art brick-phone that you proudly sported three or four years ago-and we have a tremendous opportunity to show our stuff again by getting in on the ground floor of the proliferation of optoelectronics and having a real impact on where it goes. There are plenty of signs in the industry that this is happening already.
Advanced Packaging magazine is strengthening its commitment to bringing to you the latest technical information in the established areas of packaging and in the frontiers like optoelectronics, where it is especially critical to keep ourselves up-to-date and to communicate with each other.
You might notice a new name and voice in this spot. I have been called on board to add my many years of engineering experience in the packaging world to help this effort. One of my goals in this new role is to track down the best sources of information and contributors of articles, so that we can bring to you every month – and even more often via the Internet – the truly new and valuable content that will let you keep up with the changing industry.
I've been a reader of the packaging trade press much longer than I've been an editor, so I know that disconnects abound between what the readers want and what the publications print. I want to fix those wasted opportunities for transmitting useful information. I'd love to hear any of your thoughts about what you would like to see covered more (or less!) in our pages. This is a great chance for us to work together to create the packaging resource that you find most useful.
AP
 |
Thanks for reading,
Jeffrey C. Demmin
Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]