The transition to more sophisticated packaging techniques has created several technological manufacturing and financial challenges for both chipmakers and equipment manufacturers. Flip-chip and wafer level chip scale packages (WLCSP) are rapidly becoming the preferred packaging solutions based on performance and form-factor advantages. The increased demand for high-performance packages has resulted in an increase in the need for WLCSP, gold and solder bumping services.

To keep pace with evolving technology, semiconductor and advanced packaging manufactures are applying traditional front-end equipment to leading-edge, back-end packaging applications. Yield, imaging performance in thick resists, resolution, exposure uniformity, equipment flexibility and cost performance are some of the key challenges to be addressed by the lithography equipment for back-end applications.

Established as the Gold, Solder and 300 mm technology leader, Ultratech recently unveiled its breakthrough Unity PlatformTM, which will serve as a universal foundation for Ultratech’s future-generation tools. Specifically designed to meet customers’ emerging performance, productivity and cost-of-ownership (CoO) requirements, the Unity Platform features a customer-configurable design that will support flexible manufacturing requirements as well as tool extendibility for multiple device generations. Ultratech’s new family of steppers, the AP200 and AP300, have been designed to eliminate the issues encountered with traditional back-end lithography techniques such as contact aligners. The technical advantages of the AP200 and AP300, along with their yield improvements and Cost of Ownership (CoO) advantages, makes them the low-risk, intelligent lithography solution for the advanced packaging market.