Advanced copper wire bonding technology

Wire bonding is the most dominant form of first-level chip interconnects in microelectronics with gold wire bonding taking the lead for the past few decades. Today, it is evident that the shift from gold to copper wire bonding is genuinely picking up, due to both a surge in gold prices and recent developments in copper wire bonding technology. The course will be divided into two main sections:-1. The first section would discuss the technology trends, the building blocks for copper wire bonding, the key process factors to achieve a reliable copper wire bond and what are the implementation challenges with downstream processes such as interaction with mold compound and its package reliability aspects. 2. The second section would discuss the recent developments in equipment, copper wire material and capillary and how these help realize copper wire bonding in production implementation and how the gaps between gold and copper wire bonding are shorten.