After six years of development, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas) is moving its pioneering redistributed chip packaging (RCP) technology to early commercial production, said Navjot Chhabra, RCP operations manager.
Wafers holding RCP-optimized chips aimed at MP3 players were received at Freescale’s Tempe, Ariz., facility earlier this month, to be followed in two months by Freescale-designed ICs for a Japan-based digital camera customer, Chhabra said. After several months of pilot-mode production in Tempe and product certification at the two initial customers, RCP will move to volume production in the first quarter of 2009 at Tempe, where Freescale has built a 12,000 ft2 RCP production facility with a capacity of ~800,000 units per week. About 35 dedicated manufacturing people work at the Tempe facility, backed up by another 35 R&D engineers.
The approach has passed commercial-grade reliability specs. Over the next two years, Freescale’s plans call for RCP to be used to reduce the size and improve the performance of a wide variety of Freescale silicon, starting with wireless ICs and moving later to high-performance networking chips, digital signal processors (DSPs) and microprocessors.
“Our direction is moving from simply chip design and package assembly to system design and system assembly. We will be moving up the value chain,” Chhabra said.
Freescale has been developing the RCP technology since 2002, spurred by expectations that wireless RCP modules could shrink by 30% in the X, Y and Z dimensions. Because the RCP approach processes lots consisting of 25 300 mm panels at a time, there also are cost advantages, particularly over ball grid array (BGA) packaging, he said. Conventional BGA packaging uses expensive substrates and gold wires. RCP uses optical aligners and wet etch processes to define I/O connections with 25-30 µm feature sizes. The approach encapsulates and builds up the I/O connections using “low-tech, assembly-like manufacturing tools to keep the cost of RCP manufacturing low,” he said.
