A Brief History of Semiconductor Packaging

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[reginaldjeeves]

Yung Tao, age 85, of San Diego, CA, passed away on Saturday, February 16, 2013. He was born on August 14, 1927 in Kunming, China and immigrated to the United States in September 1947 to attend college. He received a B.A. in Political Science from Iowa Wesleyan College before focusing on glass and ceramic engineering at Alfred University in Alfred, NY, where he earned a B.S. in Glass Technology and an M.S. in Ceramic Engineering. While at Alfred, he met his wife Grace and they married on September 5, 1953. After initial jobs at North American Refractories, Sylvania Electric and Westinghouse Electric, he went on to work at Texas Instruments in Dallas Texas. There, as Manager and Chief Product Engineer of hermetic seals and header development, he was instrumental in developing technologies needed to produce the first integrated circuit assemblies. In 1971 he and his family moved to San Diego, CA, where he became Vice President of Dielectric Systems and subsequently, a founding partner of Ceramic Systems, where he served as Vice President and later President. At these companies, Yung developed important new technologies for the rapidly advancing semiconductor industry. He spent the final few years of his career at Amdahl Corp., where he was involved in the design and development of mainframe computers. In addition to his professional career, Yung also built a successful side business around the Southern California real estate boom. After retirement, he became a Certified Financial Planner and worked in that field for a short time. Yung was the patriarch of the extended family and worked ceaselessly to bring the family together and provide for everyone's futures. As well as providing for his immediate family, he sponsored his nieces Mindy and Jing and their families, plus four other Chinese students into the United States, and helped them all become established. In his later years he lived a quiet life tending his koi pond at his home in University City. In the end he was content with what he had achieved in his life and was at peace, knowing that he was leaving his family whole and well. He is survived by his wife Grace, daughter Janet (Mike Rapozo), sons Andy (Jeanne Beesley) and Peter (Jenny Chen) and granddaughter Aimee. He is sorely missed by all.

[patricktwo]

Thank you for treating the inch with the respect it deserves.

[michaelsnow]

As someone doing their PhD in advanced packaging, I'm glad it's being discussed 😊 can't wait for the 3DHI video

[thomasgreis]

I worked with a Tung Tao in the late 70’s at a company in San Diego called Ceramic Systems. He was an older engineer there and was a very nice guy. I had no idea until I watched the video that he was the inventor of a type of semi package at TI.

[cva]

Good video. I'm particularly pleased that you cleared up the confusion about seagulls.

[niceguy]

I'm biased because it's my field but I'd love to see your take on the field of modern Signal Integrity - packaging advancements such as what you've described here have been crucial to allowing us to make electrons dance in just the right way. Thanks for the video!

[mikesk]

9:01 I'd also add, that it's not just "drilling a hole" through the PCB. That would be the least of it. The hole needs to be electrically conductive and solder must adhere to it perfectly. The most usual way to do it is to deposit copper chemically.

[KNfLrPn]

11:07 Note that the pins of the chip shown here are not gull-wing, they are J-leads, which are designed to be both solderable and socketable. In fact if you look at the pin that's in focus, you can see the vertical scratches from this chip previously being in a socket.

[RedEvoPro]

Hello Jon, I am a Senior in highschool beginning my journey into EE, and your videos are a great way to learn about the EE industry as a whole, I like to say its all about learning to stand on the shoulders of giants, and your channels is the best way to learn for that. Thank you for your videos, I really appreciate them.

[bakedbeings]

I've been waiting for this one! Thanks for illuminating that murky, physical space between chip design and circuit design 🙏

[glypnir]

This is a fairly good list of the variety of package types for digital ICs. It seriously misrepresents the actors and difficulties of plastic packages. For example it’s not gooping plastic around a chip, it’s high speed injection molding. There is still a problem with bond wires touching during the molding process, and there’s a complex program to verify that a given pad arrangement on the chip works with a given lead frame and package design. The plastic is generally injected from below the chip to make the bond wires go upward. This seems obvious now, but I have talked to someone who was around at the time, and he said it was not obvious then. He worked at Texas Instruments, not at Fairchild, and I believe TI had the patent for that and did lots of other crucial work on plastic packaging. Another issue on plastic packaging is stress on the chip. There is residual stress on the chip because the plastic equilibrium warp a bit as it cools after the injection. The stress will change with soldering and with temperature changes during operation. This isn’t too bad for purely digital chips, but if you’re trying for good analog performance, need to design for it. Ceramic packaging is much more stable.

Normally testing is done on the wafer as well, not just after packaging. That way the packaging cost is avoided for most of the defective devices.

There are lots of interesting packages not mentioned for chips which require high analog performance, high power dissipation, or high voltage - 1500 V is common - isolation.

[aidanwelch]

I would love to see a video on the transition of semiconductor manufacturing from Europe and America to largely Asia.

[artiem]

an interesting sideline in chip packaging was the alpha-particle contamination issue affecting early dynamic ram chips in ceramic packages -- in some ceramic packages, the ceramics contained alpha emitters, which introduced errors into the DRAM cells... when this was discovered, the hunt was on for alpha-free packaging. One winner, Coors Ceramics.

[harrisonhschan]

thanks for this video! I'm taking a MEMS design course this semester (inspired by your earlier videos) and this packaging video released right around the same time as our chapter on packaging... great overview!

[unreliablenarrator]

OK for a start as a basic primer, but it's a deep & broad subject so there is room to build a series on this. Your timeline on flip chip is off by more than a decade, IBM pioneered C4 in the 1960s. And, well, 3D packaging for both die stacking & package level is now mainstream for some devices/application. One final note: virtually every form of device packaging invented is still used. That, itself, is remarkable.

[greghawley]

In my career, I've always heard the DIP package pronounced as the word dip and not as the letters D, I and P. Great video. Appreciate your work!

[jimbarchuk]

Minor adjustment, there's no need for d-i-p. It's pronounced dip, rhymes with tip or nip. The single-inline is SIP, pronounced sip.

Detail, through holes are not about structural integrity at all, just making connections between pins.

[topear]

When I worked at Nortel I was told by a colleague who had two PhDs and two masters degrees that if you ever want to make infinite money specialize in packaging

[nicholasvinen]

Nice video. The device shown at 3:24 is not an IC as such, it is a hybrid circuit packaged like an IC.

[michaellau]

I (used to) teach a class on IC packaging, and I have to say this video is very well done. Good job!