The lab, located at the company’s suburban Chicago headquarters, contains a class 10,000 cleanroom, plus the latest in metrology and test equipment including x-ray, C-SAM, SEM and EDS for post-assembly analysis.

The new lab features an array of state-of-the-art process equipment, including flip chip bonders and plasma cleaners. The site can perform such operations as thin-die stacking, wire bonding, multichip bonding (package on package), and ultrasonic flip-chip bonding. As PFSA microelectronics engineering manager Gene Dunn noted, “For the first time in North America, customers can qualify samples on high volume production equipment, not semiautomatic tools.”
 
Panasonic has outfitted the site with an FCX501 gold-to-gold ultrasonic bonder, PSX303 inline plasma cleaner, HW27 wire bonder, FCB3 multipurpose bonder, and an IPAC-CS module chip mounter. An Asymtek S-820 underfill dispenser, Dage 7600 x-ray, Sonoscan D9000 acoustic microscope, JOEL SEM, Heller 1800 EXL oven, and Vision Engineering digital microscopes round out the equipment set.

Among the capabilities exhibited: a four-die, three spacer chip-on-chip mounted on a 200 μm substrate, die-to-wafer boinding using thermocompression, and flip-chip to organic using gold-to-gold wiring.

“For the microelectronics business, it is important [to be able to provide] live process demos near customer sites,” said PFSA president Alex Shimada.

For U.S. customers, that no doubt comes as welcome news.