It’s a major breakthrough for customers
With gold prices surging in recent years, the semiconductor industry has been increasingly replacing the precious metal with the more affordable copper in the wire bonding process, leading to huge savings in the cost of manufacturing a chip.
Wire bonding is the process of providing the electrical connection between the silicon chip and the external leads of the semiconductor device using very fine thread mostly made out of gold.
“The shift from gold to copper is a game changer. It’s a major breakthrough for customers because it lowers the overall bill of the material for semi-conductor circuits,” Bruno Guilmart, CEO Kulicke & Soffa, which designs and manufactures semiconductor assembly equipment, told CNBC Asia.
“It depends on the complexity of the chip but I would say savings are anywhere from 10- 25 percent,” said Guilmart, who estimates 80 percent of chip demand is now driven by consumer electronics.
via CNBC – Lisa Oake