News and New Products

Consortium Produces Solder Bumped 300mm Wafer

Electronic News -- Electronic News, 4/23/2001

Kalispell, Mont.-based Semitool Inc. and the Semiconductor Equipment Consortium for Advanced Packaging (SECAP), of which it is a charter member, today announced the successful development of a solder-bumping process for 300mm wafers.

The technological advancement was a multi-company effort. Semitool's (nasdaq: SMTL) computational-fluid-dynamics (CFD) reactor supplied the plating technology to create a dense array of uniform high-lead solder bumps down to 20microns in diameter, with greater than 4200 I/O on a 10mm-by-10 mm die.

Karl Suss of Munich, Germany, enabled the high-density array by providing 300mm equipment for coat, exposure and develop. Unaxis of Zurich, Switzerland, created a full-face copper seed layer by sputtering with no edge exclusion. Image Technology of Palo Alto, California, produced the mask for clear edge-bead and full-area exposure on 300mm wafers.  Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration of Berlin, Germany, consulted and coordinated the development efforts.