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Dr. Martin Anselm, director of the Center for Electronics Manufacturing and Assembly (CEMA) at the Rochester Institute of Technology
Andy Shaughnessy: What is the biggest challenge that you or your customers are facing in the industry?
Dr. Martin Anselm: The biggest challenge I’ve encountered a number of different times is the migration to much larger packaging. Devices are getting much larger, and with the thousands of I/O of solder joints, and they are not just single-die, multi-chip modules in different forms or 2.5D technologies. Further, there are challenges associated with soldering. How do we go away from traditional soldering technologies or methodologies where these devices are so complex that warpage or alloy or reliability is driving us into unknown territories with soldering methodologies? To give you good yields and 100% interconnects, you can’t necessarily go with the traditional methods.
Shaughnessy: Everybody talks about miniaturization, but on the other hand, you’re also seeing things getting bigger and bigger.
Dr. Anselm: Right. Miniaturization is happening in the context of finer pitch, and closer interconnect spacing. But to create functionality, the number of interconnects is increasing. The devices are getting larger, but the density of interconnects is getting smaller.
Shaughnessy: Designers are having a hard time fanning out from these 5,000-pin BGAs. It’s kind of a nightmare.
Dr. Anselm: Exactly. It will be interesting to see where the industry goes in the next two to three years. There’s a lot of active R&D work to overcome some of these specific challenges, and these are for products that are consumer electronics and going into millions of units per year. There has to be a solution that’s repeatable, reliable, and fast and gives good yields, but that’s very difficult to do.
To read this original interview, which appeared in Show & Tell Magazine, click here.
