A New Approach to Produce Cost-effective Known Good Die

Known good die is an enabling technology for the application on the wide range of electronic industry especially for multichip module application. Wafer level burn-in is an ideal methodology to produce KGD's, but there needs a considerable amount of time until it emerges to a viable process which should be practical and economical. In the mean time, die level burn-in becomes a common method to produce KGD for its practical application as several different types of burn-in carriers are commercially available. In this paper, a new cost effective process to produce KGD is proposed. Conventional wire bonding method was applied for electrical interconnection from chip to printed circuit board, designed for testing several chip together with a multichip holder. A proprietary tool was applied to cut gold wire from bond pad. Mass production of KGD was possible with the new process. Engineering samples, I Meg slow static RAM, produced by the new process showed excellent reliability and provided a significant amount of engineering data. It is believed that the new process can produce known good bare die most economically among existing die level burn-in methods. Because it used well established wire bonding technology rather than burn-in carrier to provide temporary contact between chip to test equipment which quite often proved unreliable in terms of contact resistance and can be used only limited number of times.