Plastic Packaging Consortium-first year results

The Plastic Packaging Consortium is a funded Technology Reinvestment Project (TRP) awarded in the FY94 competition on low-cost electronic packaging. The ten companies $20M+ cost-shared effort, led by National Semiconductor Corp., will establish the on-shore infrastructure to manufacture low-cost, high density, high performance "ruggedized" plastic packages. This initiative comes from the increasing need to improve complexity, performance, and reliability of plastic packages for both military and commercial use, while lowering the total system cost. The Program focuses on three areas of improvement: (1) plastic package "ruggedization"; (2) plastic package thermal enhancement; and, (3) high density plastic packages. Advances in molding compounds, die attach materials, leadframe materials, leadframe design, and reliability characterization will be accomplished. The deliverables at the end of the two-year Program will be plastic package processes and materials, which require no dry-bagging, eliminate "popcorning", improve low-cost (stamped) fine pitch leadframes, and utilize low-cost interconnect processes for high density packaging. This paper reports the results obtained in the three focus areas after the first year of activities.