General > General Technical Chat
PCB black blob of glue ICs during the 70's-90's
tooki:
Amusingly, I posted my earlier reply on the way to work, and then today at work, I finally got to see wire bonding done in person. One of the PhD students I’ve assembled tons of boards for is working on silicon radiation detectors. We assemble the readout boards for him, onto which he then attaches a die and performs the wire bonding. I’d asked him to let me watch the next time he did some, and that ended up being today!
james_s:
--- Quote from: tooki on November 02, 2022, 04:54:26 pm ---There are videos on YouTube showing how it’s done. A human places the die on the PCB and loads it into the wire bonding machine, which uses machine vision to identify the bond pads and then bonds them.
--- End quote ---
Even today? Surely a machine could place the die on the PCB at least as effectively as a human.
tooki:
I’m sure it’s often done by machine, especially in higher-wage countries than China. To me, it’s one of those manufacturing steps that I would never have guessed was ever done by hand, but China does by hand anyway. I suppose it also depends on the volume.
Miyuki:
--- Quote from: tooki on November 04, 2022, 07:24:45 am ---I’m sure it’s often done by machine, especially in higher-wage countries than China. To me, it’s one of those manufacturing steps that I would never have guessed was ever done by hand, but China does by hand anyway. I suppose it also depends on the volume.
--- End quote ---
I saw in an old documentary from Czechoslovakia how they switched from manual bonding to semi-automatic (the operator chooses just orientation and first point) in the 70s and early 80s
But the main reason for them was to speed up production as there were not enough people to do it.
So I can see how it can work in China with an army of poorly paid workers. They have no problem finding more people.
tom66:
Probably also depends on the number of bonds.
A small "toy chip" that just generates sound when the "toy trigger" is pulled might have 5 or 6 pads, "easy" to bond.
A Casio calculator IC with hundreds for the matrix display and keypad? Forget about doing that manually on any economical scale.
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