24 May 2012

Texas Instruments drives adoption of copper wire bonding forward

Texas Instruments has shipped nearly 6.5 billion units of copper wire bonding technology in its analogue, embedded processing and wireless products.

According to TI, this milestone underscores its confidence in copper as a viable replacement to gold in its semiconductor product roadmaps, and the electronics industry’s acceptance of the technology, due to performance, quality and reliability benefits for a range of applications.

“While the rising and fluctuating cost of gold was an original driver for making the switch to copper, the technology’s overall advantages today are undeniable,” said Devan Iyer, director of Semiconductor Packaging in TI’s Technology & Manufacturing Group. “Copper wire bonding is delivering a performance boost to customers, and through TI’s flexible internal and external manufacturing, we are able to deliver production at the same or higher levels than gold.”

Wire bonding technology connects the silicon die pads and semiconductor package leads with thin wires. TI was an early leader in the pursuit, development and implementation of copper wire bonding technology as an alternative to gold.

After several years of research, development and product qualifications, TI proved that copper wire bonding is a high volume production process across a wide variety of products with equal or better manufacturability compared to gold.

TI claims copper provides superior electrical performance with 40 percent higher electrical conductivity, resulting in lower operating resistance. This, in turn, improves overall product performance in high-speed digital, high-current mixed signal, and power management applications.

The company began shipping copper wire in its products in 2008, and today, all seven of TI’s assembly and test (A/T) sites are running copper wire bonding production across a range of products and package types, including quad flat no lead (QFN) packages, ball grid array packages such as nFBGA and PBGA; package-on-package (PoP); QFPs; TQFPs; TSSOPs; SOICs and PDIPs.

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