An excerpt from the Semiconductor Assembly Blog by Andy C. Mackie, Global Product Manager for Indium Corporation’s Semiconductor and Advanced Assembly Materials.
For reasons that I will discuss in a post later this year, a common factor that is emerging in the area of copper-pillar microbump 2.5D and 3D joining, is the adoption of thermocompression (TC) bonding for flip-chip flux/microbump soldering. TC bonding is now being predominantly adopted instead of reflow. Some of you may have the same response as I got at iMAPS 2011 from one well-known expert in packaging technology. He looked askance at me when I mentioned TC bonding for flip-chip and retorted: “That’s for bonding wafers, not soldering flip-chips!”. Even good old Wikipedia (at time of writing) seems to have the same problem – basically that the industry usage of the term has moved into the packaging arena. (Full Story)