Brown Bag Engineers

Although most of the semiconductor industries’ greatest discoveries and inventions are the results of years of research and development at prestigious universities and research institutes, some of the best solutions out there were developed in the trenches, on the manufacturing floor. Out of these ideas, entire companies have emerged, and have become successful purely by trial and error. In this Roadshow, we visited two companies who took a grass roots approach to success.

Jeff Fugere, president, DL Technologies, describes his company’s approach to product development as brown-bag engineering; they draw their ideas, bring them to the lab, and try them out. The company builds dispense pumps and tips for semiconductor equipment manufacturers. Fugere’s vision: “If we could manufacture the right pump, we would be able to sell to all the (equipment) manufacturers,” he explained. And that’s pretty much what he’s done.

HCD sprung up from a seed idea at Cornell University in 2000 with the intention of serving the land grid array (LGA) package market. Charlie Stevenson, chief operating officer (COO), and his team had a clear idea of the product they wanted to create: a high-connection-density chip- or package-level interconnect device. If existing tools weren’t good enough, they designed and built their own. Today, HCD makes test and production sockets, solderless PCB-to-PCB interconnects for medical and ATE markets, and LGA sockets.


Business is all in the family at DL Technologies. Gail Flower, editor-in-chief, Advanced Packaging, (far left) and Françoise von Trapp (far right), managing editor, share a photo opportunity with Jeff Fugere, president, Donna Fugere, office manager, and Corey Fugere, V.P. of sales and applications specialist.
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Braided copper wire spools into a coating system, where the process of SuperButton production begins. Charlie Stevenson, COO, HCD, hands Meredith Courtemanche, contributing editor, Advanced Packaging, a finished SuperButton, while Chris Platt, group publisher, looks on.
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DL Technologies, Haverhill, MA

 


This dispense tip can be made to the customer’s gauge of choice, beginning at 27. They are machined rather than rolled, for a smooth interior.
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Inventory is cataloged and stored with military precision. Because parts don’t occupy much storage space, a large inventory can be maintained. This allows for quick turn around on shipping orders.
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Rick Massero demonstrates how auger pump housings are machined.
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Each machine has 20 tools that are interchanged automatically. All the housings are run through each step concurrently.
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Fully assembled housings are ready to ship to a customer.
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Fugere displays the completed auger dispense pump, designed to customer specifications.
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In the lab, a test pattern is run with a cross needle dispensing conductive epoxy to determine which gauge needle would be best suited to handle the viscosity of the material.
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Get the full story at www.apmag.com

HCD, Sunnyvale, CA

 


A long, narrow oven is used to cure the jacket material which is coating the braided wire SuperButton cable.
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HCD designed and patented their own cutting stations, replacing a larger system that was not accurate enough to meet the company’s needs. Here, the machine cuts SuperButtons at a specified length.
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Springs and Buttons are inserted into an FR4 carrier substrate and laminated into place.
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Courtemanche performs some optical inspection, checking out a SuperSpring version interposer in detail.
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Final electrical test station for finished interposers before shipping.
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This Instron is used for various validation and mechanical life testing of the SuperButton and SuperSpring interposers.
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