Issue

My wife and I have always been Sherlock Holmes fans. While not as exciting as Harry Potter, who can forget those old Basil Rathbone black-and-white episodes, or the newer ones starring Jeremy Brett and his slicked-back hair?

The other day I had a few extra moments and decided to indulge in a guilty pleasure — reading a magazine just for the fun of it.

A fabless semiconductor company using an outsourcing model relies on a foundry for wafer fabrication, a testing house for wafer sort and an assembly house for chip assembly. The multiple manufacturing processes involved make it difficult for the fabless company to isolate the cause of an assembly failure.

Many factors in semiconductor manufacturing have contributed to an increased need for protection of wafers, singulated die or ICs during the back-end processes.

Low-temperature cofired ceramics (LTCC) are finding increasing application in standard components such as multilayer chip capacitors, which are manufactured in high volume today.

When a new technology emerges, talk typically centers on more gigahertz, fewer micrometers or higher integration densities. In the background, however, a quiet revolution is taking place in the form of process technologies, manufacturing structures and new forms of collaboration between industry partners.

The seemingly unquenchable thirst of semiconductor manufacturers for faster and more powerful microchips places great demands on required semiconductor manufacturing processes.

Impending legislation is forcing the pace of progress toward lead-free electronic products, and the industry is close to finalizing suitable replacement solder alloys and associated processes.

Today's trend of increased miniaturization of components and packages is continuing in the electronics and micromechanics industries. Design and manufacturing technologies such as optoelectronics, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and micro-opto-electromechanical systems (MOEMS) are creating new application requirements and inspection needs.