Earlier this week, SEMATECH—the global semiconductor industry’s research consortium—announced that it plans to conduct “Equipment Maturity Assessments (EMAs) of several critical 3D tools during 2012 to establish functional equipment capabilities and address high-volume manufacturing maturity issues” through its wholly owned subsidiary IMSI (the International SEMATECH Manufacturing Alliance). In particular, the research will focus on relatively new manufacturing operations that are critical to the development of high-volume 3D chip assembly including temporary bonding for wafer-handling operations, wafer thinning, through-silicon via (TSV) reveal operations, creation of signal and power re-distribution layers, wafer-to-wafer or die-to-die bonding, and wafer release. These operations are all new for wafer fabs and assembly houses and standards have yet to emerge.
See the full SEMATECH press release here.
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