ST Assembly Test Services (STATS) has launched a new integrated circuit package for the wired and wireless communications markets.
ST Assembly Test Services (STATS) has launched a new integrated circuit package for the wired and wireless communications markets. The new Stacked Die Ball Grid Array (SDBGA) is distinguished by its stacking feature, combining various ICs in one package, which can significantly reduce not only manufacturing cost but also reduce testing time and real estate on the motherboard. Both the mounting area and chip weight of an SDBGA can be reduced as much as 70%, compared with conventional packages.

“The SDBGA’s multi-die application easily meets current market demand for communications devices.

Increasingly, these devices pack a lot of capability into a smaller size, cost less, are easier to produce and offer faster time to market than a single chip solution”, says BJ Han, STATS Chief Technology Officer.

SDBGA has all the characteristics of near Chip Scale Packages (CSPs) - advanced packages that are lighter in weight, a smaller size and provide higher performance.

It is the latest addition to STATS’ CSP family following the introduction of the Flip Chip Small-Thin Plastic BGA (FCstPBGA) last August.

Wireless communications is a key application.

Handphones, for example, contain both flash and SRAM ICs and by stacking these on top of one another in an SDBGA package, the chip size is retained with enhanced capability.

The SDBGA offers an ideal configuration for the emerging memory and logic combination in one package.

Memory density and electrical performance are improved while reducing the package and testing costs that can occur prior to installation into a product.

Other applications for Stacked Die BGAs include MP3, MD players, and handheld devices such as PDAs, camcorders and palmtops.

With its two-in-one feature, the total SDBGA package height is typically 1.4mm.

Popular SDBGA sizes range from 8 x 8 to 14 x 14mm, with pin counts between 80 and 140.

After 35 years in business Mica and Micanite (Ireland) has changed its name to Micam.
After 35 years in business Mica and Micanite (Ireland) has changed its name to Micam. The new name and logo will appear on all company documentation from January 2001. Micam has already been in use as the company registered domain name for email and the web site (www.micam.com) for some time.

The change of name follows a major development programme, which has seen the company invest in excess of IEP 4m in expanding and improving production capacity over the past 4 years, demonstrating our commitment to continually improving service to both existing and new customers.

The Micam range now includes: single and double sided PCBs; glass-epoxy industrial laminates and prepregs, plus specials in differing colours and resin systems; decorative and electrical laminates with enhanced fire properties; low smoke laminates for use underground, in marine and construction industries; specialised copper-clad laminates for printed circuitry; and CNC-machined components in GRP.

ST Assembly Test Services (STATS) has received Quality System Requirements QS9000 certification.
ST Assembly Test Services (STATS) has received Quality System Requirements QS9000 certification. QS9000 is a total quality system encompassing all aspects of a business, from management responsibility and continuous improvement to customer satisfaction and preventive measures. QS9000 is the latest achievement in STATS’ continuous commitment to attain the highest international quality benchmarks.

In year 2000, STATS achieved Semiconductor Assembly Council (SAC) Level 1, OHSAS18001 and ISO14001 certification, and ISO9001 the previous year.

“It’s a continuous journey to get better at what we do”, said Tan Bock Seng, STATS Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

“The bar is being raised all the time in the marketplace and STATS intends to have all the right quality and manufacturing standards to meet the expectations of global semiconductor companies we serve”.

It took STATS just six months to qualify for QS9000 certification from the Singapore Productivity and Standards Board (PSB), a national standards and certification body.

QS9000 is based on ISO9001 with about 200 additional requirements and it has become a widely adopted quality benchmark for global semiconductor companies.

STATS’ QS9000 certification covered all facets of its business from wafer sort to the design and development of test programs, and advanced packaging for ICs.

It included a stringent product quality program from the planning stage right through to product launch.

A comprehensive list of measures is also in place at each stage to ensure consistent quality.

ST Assembly Test Services has been selected by NEC for a three-year manufacturing agreement to provide full turnkey test and assembly services for its ICs for hard disk drives.
ST Assembly Test Services (STATS) has been selected by NEC Corp of Japan for a three-year manufacturing agreement to provide full turnkey test and assembly services for its ICs for hard disk drives. The agreement is expected to generate about US$20m for STATS over the three years. NEC qualified STATS in record time and volume production began in late 2000, making STATS one of the key suppliers for NEC’s outsourced hard disk drive business.

“Given its mixed signal leadership, STATS was able to match the stringent standards of our inhouse testing process”, said Toshifumi Misono, Planning Department Manager, 1st System LSI Division, NEC Corp.

Under the agreement, STATS will provide complete high-end mixed-signal testing and assembly for NEC’s ICs used in the hard disk drives of personal computers.

The long-term agreement guarantees NEC regularity in its supply chain and quick cycle time in the fast moving electronics and PC industry.

“We’re extremely pleased to be working with NEC, one of the world’s top semiconductor companies, and particularly as Japanese IDMs are known for their high standard of quality and manufacturing best practices”, said Tan Bock Seng, STATS Chairman and CEO.

Flextronic, the UK’s largest manufacturer of high technology flexible circuits and subassemblies, has announced that it has changed its name to Teknoflex.
Flextronic, the UK’s largest manufacturer of high technology flexible circuits and subassemblies, has announced that it has changed its name to Teknoflex. The new name, which is effective immediately, is part of a strategy to relaunch the company following its expansion into high volume roll-to-roll circuit manufacture and extended assembly capability. According to Brian Shorrock, Managing Director of Teknoflex: “This extended capability, together with flex circuit, flex rigid multilayer, Regal flex and Sculptured circuit technologies, further differentiates the company in its global markets.

Our new name and its tag line, Interconnect Solutions, portrays our desire to strengthen our international bonding and promote our total design to test capability”.

Shorrock continued: “We are moving forward in a number of major industry sectors influencing and benefiting from the significant growth in the application of flexible circuit technologies in automotive, cellular phone and many other areas”.

Teknoflex exports a significant proportion of its product to blue chip customers in Europe, the USA and the Far East.

This name change has the added benefit of eliminating the confusion which has arisen due to the global expansion of the major contract manufacturer Flextronics International.

Established in Chichester, West Sussex, England, in the mid 1950s Teknoflex holds ISO 9001, BSEN 123000, MIL SPEC and UL approvals and is currently seeking QS 9000 approval.

Rittal Electronic Systems (RES) has acquired the assets of Kaparel, a former division of PixStream, based in Ontario, Canada.
Rittal Electronic Systems (RES) has acquired the assets of Kaparel, a former division of PixStream, based in Ontario, Canada.

Kaparel focuses on the assembly of CompactPCI backplanes, and will enhance Rittal’s expertise in the design and production of electronic packaging components for microcomputer packaging systems.

The systems are configured at the new European MPS competence centre at Ettlingen.

ST Assembly Test Services (STATS) has developed a tape chip scale package (TCSP), said to be ideal for applications requiring a thin package with a small form factor and high I/O density.
ST Assembly Test Services (STATS) has developed a tape chip scale package (TCSP), said to be ideal for applications requiring a thin package with a small form factor and high I/O density. Applications that can use the TCSP’s high density and small form factor include portable electronics such as pagers, cellular phones, camcorders, digital cameras, and other wireless devices that require a thin package. Chip scale packaging technology is used in both wireless and wired communications, and is characterised by a smaller footprint, which offers economy in space, lighter weight, and better thermal and electrical performance.

According to Dr BJ Han, STATS Chief Technology Officer, “CSP technology is critical to the semiconductor industry.

The complexity of advanced semiconductor devices used in wireless applications, particularly handheld devices such as handphones and personal digital assistants, requires squeezing more functionality into a tighter area.

CSP package technology helps solve this problem”.

Unlike other IC packages that use a laminate substrate, the TCSP uses very thin flexible circuit tape, which enables higher I/O density.

TCSPs range from 17 x 17 down to 4 x 4mm, with the popular size being 12 x 12mm.

The tape substrate allows for finer lines and spaces and the 0.5mm ball pitch allows for high I/O count in a small footprint.

It is the latest addition to the STATS family of advanced packaging, including the small-thin plastic ball grid array (STPBGA) and stacked die ball grid array package (SDBGA).

APW Electronic Solutions has extended its CompactPCI backplane offering with new dual DIN M power slot versions, available in 3 and 6U versions conforming to PICMG Rev 3.0.
APW Electronic Solutions has extended its CompactPCI backplane offering with new dual DIN M power slot versions, available in 3 and 6U versions conforming to PICMG Rev 3.0; 6U variants conforming to the CT/H.110 Specification are also available. All models have right-hand system slots as standard, support hot swap at all slots, are fitted with pull-up terminations on all 64 data lines and are available in widths of 4, 6 and 8 slots. All widths support 66MHz operation, even though 66MHz systems are limited by the PICMG Specification to 5 slots.

All models, including the 3U sizes, support 32 and 64bit operation and are provided with both 3.3 and 5V power planes.

To guarantee backplane clock skew of less than 1.2ns and provide the highest possible clock signal integrity, all clock lines are matched to less than +/-1mm, run on inside layers and are without vias.

The backplanes are fitted with twin DIN M power supply connectors on the left hand side of the backplane outside the CompactPCI area; they can be supplied with one or both slots populated.

A 26-way connector, located next to the DIN M slots on all versions, enables access to the APW 300W PSU signal connector, providing user access to PSU status and allowing remote control.

The two PSU positions give the additional security of hot swappable N+1 redundancy for high-availability telecomms applications, and the DIN M pinning configuration is a robust de facto industry standard used by many manufacturers.

The backplane’s power and ground planes are designed to distribute more than 125W/slot, giving a generous safety margin over the 100W/slot defined in the PICMG specification.

All DIN M backplanes have provision for Schottky diode terminations on all signal lines to ensure that the 10ns maximum propagation delay is not violated when a lightly loaded backplane is used in conjunction with strong PCI buffers.

As a further benefit, Schottky diodes also prevent damage to logic devices by clamping negative swinging signals.

Schroff reckons its new modular CompactPCI backplanes offer systems developers significantly more design freedom while keeping costs low.
Schroff reckons its new modular CompactPCI backplanes offer systems developers significantly more design freedom while keeping costs low. The CompactPCI backplane solution consists of modular backplanes, power piggybacks and one or more power backplanes. The modular backplanes comply with revision 3.0 of the CompactPCI core specification.

Models with three to eight slots are currently available in either 3 or 6U formats, the five-slot and seven-slot versions are bridgeable.

All backplanes can be abutted without loss of space, ie without losing a slot width, which would normally happen when combining two backplanes.

The user therefore saves valuable space in the subrack.

The piggyback board, which is plugged directly into the rear of the backplane, is used for connecting each power supply.

This board contains an ATX connector, various universal supply terminals for M4 eyelets (power bugs) and three drive connectors.

Thus the board not only enables power to be fed to the backplane from various sources, but also serves as a central node for power distribution in the system.

The ATX connector is used for connecting the power backplane to the P47 connector, which acts as an adapter between the backplane and 19in power supplies compliant with PICMG 2.11 (eg Schroff’s maxpowerPRO).

The user can mount this board in any position in the subrack backplane area.

By using another connector it is possible to tap-off the Inhibit or Power-on signals (ATX) for controlling the power supply unit.

Schroff developers are already working on another piggyback board designed for rear I/O solutions.

Rittal Electronic Systems (RES) is now able to offer palette bridges, which fit on the rear of a CompactPCI backplane to extend the PCI slot count beyond the statutory eight slots.
Rittal Electronic Systems (RES) is now able to offer palette bridges, which fit on the rear of a CompactPCI backplane to extend the PCI slot count beyond the statutory eight slots. Alternatively custom backplanes with the bridge embedded as an integral part can be designed for comparatively low production quantities. Also available are backplanes in 3 and 6U configurations for CompactPCI power supplies, compatible both with DIN M connectors and both positions of use for the Positronic power connector.

These power backplanes also enable N+1 redundancy and power sharing, and again can be integrated into a monolithic CompactPCI structure.

RES has recently acquired the assets of Kaparel, formerly a division of PixStream based in Ontario Canada, which focused on the assembly of Compact PCI backplanes and was the first company to introduce CompactPCI and H.110 bridging techniques.

During the last 18 months Kaparel has designed at least one new standard and one new custom cPCI backplane a week.

Kaparel’s backplanes are being incorporated into CompactPCI systems at Rittal’s new European competence centre.