CIL's GOES LIVE WITH THE UK's LARGEST SEMICONDUCTOR PACKAGING FACILITY

Wafer dicing and semiconductor plastic overmold have been added to CIL's UK capability in the new facility. 

After 12 months of fit out, the contractors are all but finished and as of Friday 26th May 2023, CIL starts transferring all micro-electronics and power device staff and equipment into this new facility. The power electronics division will be fully transferred by 16th June 2023 and the micro-electronics division will take until the end of August 2023 due to having fully qualified product lines that will require intensive re-qualification.

Over the next 3 months, all of CIL's semiconductor existing packaging equipment plus new investments and personnel will transfer into this facility in Andover UK. Semiconductor equipment that has so far been lightly used has already made the transfer, with much more to follow. Airflow balancing in the main cleanroom is complete, the changing rooms and cleanroom transfer rooms are already independently qualified to ISO8 and by Friday 26th May 2023, the 15,000sq ft cleanroom will also be qualified but to ISO7 (Class 10,000). At this point full transfer will take place.

At the far end of the cleanroom we have had constructed a segregated ISO7 class wafer dicing room complete with DISCO DAD3361 dicing saw and all associated equipment. Advanced trials with customer supplied wafers have already been concluded, Dicing of production wafers we commence by 19th June 2023 and images of the new dicing facility will be released in the coming months.

New office space and meeting facilities for the first 40 staff are now all ready to be moved into and this will commence Tues 30th May 2023. We also have further space allocated to more than double this number before the end of 2023.

In addition to the new DISCO DAD3361 wafer dicing capability, CIL has also installed a Boschman UNISTAR Automatic Film Assisted plastic overmold system. For the last 12 months, CIL has been working on RF process technology on a project named OranGaN to develop UK capability to package RF MMIC devices in plastic QFN style for future telecom and RF infrastructure. Furthermore as part of APC projects APC15@FutureBEV with BMW and more recently APC20 EleVAIT with JLR, CIL is looking to provide a SiC power module and SiC power discrete packaging capability. This Boschman UNISTAR system gives CIL a total UK based and owned process capability to provide wafer dicing, die bonding, wire bonding, test, plastic overmold, laser marking and final test.