Wire bonding UPH and stitch bond improvement using 20 micron diameter insulated wire with security bump

In this study, security bumps are used for strengthening the stitch bonds of two 20 micron diameter insulated Au wire bonding example processes. Bump bonding as a variant of the ball bonding process has been commonly used in the microelectronic industry to make bumps on dies that will later be flip-chip bonded. The optimized stitch bond parameters combined with the security bumps placed upon the stitch bonds substantially improve the second bond strength demonstrated on the two example processes on two different types of wire bonding equipment. A comparison of pull test results shows that security bumps increase stitch pull force up to 100%. The effect of varying the relative position (shift) of the security bump relative to the stitch bond location is investigated for one process. The window with the highest pull force improvement is ranging from 16 to 31 micron shift towards the ball bond. Looping with insulated wire is faster than with bare wire because of less effort to mitigate the risks of wires touching each other and producing a short. If two wire loops touch each other e.g. after molding, the wire insulation prevents shorts. Therefore, the looping requirements of the example processes with security bumps can be relaxed by reducing the number of kinks (reverses) from four to two. Due to the reduced looping complexity, the overall UPH increased with insulated wire by about 3.0 % and 4.9 % for the two processes, respectively. This increase is in spite of the time required for the additional security bumps, and compared to bare wire processes without security bumps but with more complex looping. Copyright© (2010) by IMAPS - International Microelectronics & Packaging Society.