Applying the fuzzy analytic network process to the selection of an advanced integrated circuit (IC) packaging process development project

Efficiency and accuracy are the two main factors to develop the competence for the integrated-circuit (IC) packaging industry. An IC packaging house needs to deal with problems integrating production flows of wafer in, packaging, test, and shipping in order to provide clients instant and accurate products and services information. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is an effective electronic information carrying device to collect and alter data. In this study, RFID technology, combined with RosettaNet network and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, is applied to resolve the wafer receiving and inventory transaction problems. An electronic material flow control system for IC packaging houses is developed using Oracle application implementation methodology to integrate RFID technology, RosettaNet network, and ERP system. The developed electronic material flow control system is implemented in a local IC packaging company. Results from this study suggest that labor cost and man-made errors are reduced due to the significant improvement for wafer receiving process and inventory transaction process using RFID technology. Besides that, the developed material flow control system enhances the capability of the ERP systems so as to greatly reduce operators' workload and operation costs for IC packaging houses.

In the integrated circuit (IC) packaging process, including operations of die sawing, die bonding, wire bonding, molding, plating, marking, trim/form, and inspection. Purposes of packaging include protecting ICs, making ICs easier to handle, and connecting ICs to the circuit outside. The wire bond stations are the bottleneck in the packaging and assemble process where the heat block is the key auxiliary parts in the stations. This research proposes a RFID-enabled Heat Block Management System (RHMS) to accurately control the progress of the IC packaging production line to meet the customer requirements. Our research analyzed all the flows of heat block management operations during before and after introducing RHMS. Hypothesis testing can verify significant difference between two sample sizes. Based on the statistics test of hypothesis, we compared the difference for before and after introducing RHMS. The results show that the RHMS can bring advantage for heat block management in wire bond stations. Moreover, it has clear improvement of saving counting and revising operation time. The contributions of this research are not only a case study but also a direction for applying RFID technology on IC packaging industry.

The integrated circuit (IC) industry in Taiwan is comprised mainly of IC chip design and fabrication, IC packaging, and system product design and fabrication industries. Fueled by rapid investment and development efforts from government and private sectors, this industry has sustained a rapid growth in recent years becoming one of the most profitable industries among Asian Pacific countries. This paper details Taiwan's IC packaging manufacturing capabilities and its technology trends. It describes the Taiwan IC package industry's ability to maintain favorable competitive leverage in the global business environment. This paper concentrates on two key areas of manufacturing and technology trends to illustrate Taiwan's electronic industry in general: chip-level packages and substrate and its assembly. The requirements for different applications in the future packages are discussed. The reason for the packaging paradigm shifts and associated precautions are also explained.

In semiconductor manufacturing, time-to-market is critical to maintain a competitive advantage through achieving customer satisfaction. Inefficient ways of utilising production resources will lead to a long cycle time. Therefore, machine allocation becomes an essential production decision in many practical manufacturing systems, especially for integrated circuit (IC) packaging. IC packaging is the process of encasing the finished die in a package in order to prevent corrosion and physical damage. Advanced IC packaging techniques add even more complexity into the production system, so reliable average cycle time of this complex system becomes difficult to obtain. We propose a new simulation optimisation framework with multi-fidelity models to study an IC packaging case of the machine allocation problem to pursue a minimum average cycle time. This framework consists of two methodologies: ordinal transformation (OT) and optimal sampling (OS). The OT first employs the low-fidelity model to fast observe all designs, and extracts insightful information from this model by transforming the original design space into an ordinal space. It follows that OS efficiently allocates the computing budget for searching the best design via high-fidelity simulations. An empirical study based on real data was conducted to validate the practical viability of the proposed framework.

A failure criterion for debonding initiation between molding compounds and copper leadframes in plastic encapsulated integrated circuit (IC) packages is proposed. The leadframe pull-out test is used to evaluate the bond strengths between molding compounds and leadframes in plastic encapsulated IC packages. The normal and shear stress fields along the interface are analyzed using the finite element method. An average stress approach is employed for the interface failure criterion and the tensile and shear interface bond strengths are obtained from the experimental failure loads. In a parametric study, the effects of specimen loading geometry, moisture, and surface contamination of copper leadframes on the interfacial bond strengths are specifically analyzed. The results show that the interface bond strengths determined for the two specimen geometries are consistent.

The need for compact models of Integrated circuits (IC) is a well-recognized problem in electronics cooling simulations of electronic systems. Simplified thermal models have been reported in the literature to simulate the transient thermal behavior of IC devices. Most of the simplification approaches require a pre-determined topology of a resistance-capacitance (RC) network. Multigrid technique allows for automatically constructing both the topology and characteristics of the reduced-order or compact models of devices (primarily IC packages) for use in system-level simulations. In this study, we report an approach where the topology and the nodal RC values of the network are automatically generated. The procedure is also applicable for complex IC sub-systems or systems like multi-chip modules, stacked die package, system-in-package, and CPU module, and hard drives. In the study report herein, the method is applied to three types of IC packages. The first package is a 196-pin fine pitch ball grid array (FBGA15/spl times/15/spl I.bar/196 L) package. The second package is a 480-pin plastic ball grid array (PBGA+HS37.5/spl times/37.5/spl I.bar/480 L/spl I.bar/extHS) package with drop-in heat spreader. An external heat sink is attached to the top surface of the package. The third package is an 8-pin small outline IC (SOIC/spl I.bar/480 L) package with a total power dissipation of 0.5 W. RC networks are created for these packages and then used in CFD simulations for different boundary conditions, corresponding to single phase natural and forced convective cooling. The simulation results are compared to the corresponding detailed package simulations.

This article discusses configurations of light-emitting diode (LED) light sources for visual inspection of integrated circuit (IC) packages. A package visual inspection (PVI) system with multiple LED light sources used for inspection of IC packages was designed. The image contrast changes of the sample IC packages are explained using the Torrance-Sparrow (TS) model. A few conclusions on appropriate lighting configurations for inspection of various IC packages are achieved. The TS model can be used to represent the specular lobe component. The contrast between two surfaces with different surface roughness values increases with increasing θ i (incident light angle). Lighting C (θ i = 75°) is recommended for packages with high surface roughness heights and resin materials. Lighting B (θ i = 60°) is recommended for packages with moderate surface roughness heights and metal materials. If the background is white, the use of light sources A (θ i = 15°) and B simultaneously is recommended. Light sources A and C are recommended to be chosen for packages with low surface roughness values and transparent materials. The experimental results with the actual gray-level values of the images are compared to support the conclusions. The PVI system is part of an inspection machine. All images of the sample IC packages reported in this article were obtained from an actual production line. Therefore, the results are close to those of the actual inspection situation in the manufacturing industry.

Currently, the analytic network process (ANP) method is widely employed to consider the multiple criteria analysis problems with dependence and feedback effects. However, in order to extend the ANP to resolve the problem of uncertainty or human subjective judgment, the concepts of fuzzy numbers should be incorporated into the ANP to represent the subjective uncertain pairwise judgments. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) model by solving a mathematical programming problem. Unlike other FANPs, the proposed method does not require the reciprocity assumption of the weight ratios between criteria, and it can derive local and global weights simultaneously in a single model. Two numerical examples of international investment problems are used to demonstrate the proposed method.

A fuzzy analytic network process (ANP) model for measurement of the sectoral competititon level (SCL)

The purpose of this study is to develop a fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) model to evaluate and select a portfolio of Islamic stocks on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX). A fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) is used to the develop indicator and portfolio selection ranking. It can make it easier for investors to make investment decisions through financial portfolio return. However, in fact and reality, investors need fast investment decision, therefore, portfolio selection is most important. The fuzzy-ANP analysis method can be used to evaluate and to make prioritize ranking of investment decision variables. The results of this study are found that profitability is the most important criterion for investors to select Islamic stock portfolios in Indonesia stock exchange. In addition, the value of Return on assets (ROA), Return on equity (ROE), Return on Investment (ROI), Net profit margin (NPM), Earning per share, return on sales Ratio and Return on Capital of a company.

The development of integrated circuit (IC) packaging is one of the important factors for the advanced production of the semi-conductor industry. With the recent rise of innovative demand of the production technology, lot of issues had been raised at the manufacturing level especially at back-end production. In order to solve the problem, finite element analysis (FEA) is one of the methods that has been broadly used to evaluate the internal stress of IC package. The performance effect of tetrahedral or hexahedral dominance elements in the meshing stage may lead to the unswerving of FEA results. In such condition, the performance of the element type needs to be analyzed in order to determine which implementation leads to result with higher confident level. This study used the quasi-static simulation of FEA to determine the performance of tetrahedral and hexahedral dominance elements in FEA of IC package strength. The monitored stress was focused on the component levels of IC package, the die and the diepad. The IC package is modelled in three-dimensional case which represented as close as the actual product by simplifying certain parts. The performance evaluation had considered the effect of grid independent study for each of the element type. The maximum stress produced by using the tetrahedral element had been compared with the stress produced by the hexahedral dominance elements. Comparison of the performance showed that the value of the maximum stress produced from hexahedral dominance element was significantly higher at 16% to 40% than the solution obtained from the tetrahedral element. It is found that by using hexahedral element in the finite element analysis, a significant higher value of Von Mises stress is produced, which is more than 505 MPa in diepad. This stress value has been established by previous study within the plastic deformation range and also has good agreement with the physical examination.Â

The uncertainty of data and weighting of variables are prima facie problems to model the green supply chain (GrSC) performance. The paper modelled GrSC performance of plastic film by fuzzy logic analysis-fuzzy analytic network process approach to overcome these hurdles. Fuzzy logic analysis is used to derive fuzzy score of variables using MATLAB. Further, fuzzy analytic network process is used to calculate global weights of variables. Thus, green score of supply chain performance for plastic film is computed as 28.83. Green supply chain performance analysis of plastic films is done for present status and computed as 48.62. The solutions developed by author's viz. adoption of best practices for blown film extrusion process and 'design for environment' tool for segregating MSW at source are analysed. It is found that, if the tools adopted simultaneously, the GrSC performance score resulted in 27.38. This is well below green score making the plastic film industry environment friendly. Approach is suitable for modelling small scale systems GrSC performance.

A new method to measure the moisture content of integrated circuit (IC) packages is demonstrated. The moisture contained in the encapsulant resin was determined by using microwaves. The microwave signal was transmitted into the encapsulant resin and reflected at the surface of the chip pad. The amplitude and phase of the reflection coefficient of the microwave signal, which varied with the moisture content of the encapsulant resin, were measured in order to determine the moisture content. A preliminary experiment was carried out, and the calibration equation was developed. The present technique indicates the possibility of determining the moisture content directly without drying and weighing IC packages.

During the solder reflow process, popcorn cracking will occur in integrated circuit (IC) package under vapor pressure and thermal load. Based on the elasticity theory, the singular stress field around the apex of the delaminated interface between die-pad and resin is obtained numerically. The generalized stress intensity factors are computed to evaluate the residual strength of the structure. Also, the structural stability is discussed by using the strain energy density theory. Two factors that are concerned in this paper include the relative stiffness ratio E/sub die-pad//E/sub resin/ and the relative thickness h~. The results show that lower stiffness ratio gives weaker stress singularity. In addition, larger h~ will increase generalized stress intensity factors and structural stability. As a conclusion for our case, moderate value of h~ (say h~=0) is recommended for design.

This paper presents the development of a nondestructive evaluation method for delamination detection in integrated circuit (IC) packages. The developed method allows for quantitative detection of sealant delamination between integrated heat sink (IHS) and substrate, which is considered a potential failure mechanism in IC packages. The proposed method is expected to overcome the destructive nature of most existing techniques, while maintaining low cost of development. The reported development consists of the following processes: First, flash thermographic analysis is investigated and shown to be incapable of detecting a realistic sealant delamination. Then, ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs) are used as the chosen interrogation method due to their sensitivity to small-size damage and structural thickness variations. The complexity of the received ultrasonic signals caused by the geometric heterogeneity is resolved using a time–frequency signal processing technique. The extracted ultrasonic information, including time-of-arrival (TOA) and amplitude of wave modes received from different sensing paths under multiple excitation frequencies, is then used to construct a feature space. A multivariate Gaussian model is implemented as an information fusion and delamination detection tool, which investigates the distribution of feature space including correlations between features. Results from the developed model are compared with two existing evaluation methods, including pullout force measurement and a delamination metric. The developed method is seen to possess a similar level of accuracy with a nondestructive nature.