Texas Instruments Inc. announced Thursday (Nov. 6) that the company will open a 300mm wafer bumping facility in Chengdu, China. TI described the move as the third leg of a “long-term China strategy,” unveiled in 2010, to establish production facilities in China.

With the new site, TI is striving to assure customers of a “broad-based technology platform,” and a “manufacturing foothold that can support a large customer base with big volume needs,” Paul Fego, vice president of worldwide manufacturing for TI, told EE Times.

With analog cited as its core business, TI’s focus is on its internal production facilities and expanding capacity fast enough to support its rapidly growing analog and power management IC businesses.

Noting that TI is one of the two analog companies with 300mm processing capability (Infineon being another), Dean Freeman, research vice president at Gartner, said that the new wafer bumping facility helps TI maintain leadership in 300mm analog technology.

According Gartner, TI grabbed a 21.4 percent share in 2013 of a $19.4 billion total analog market. The market research firm estimates $21.154 billion in revenue in 2014. 

Bumping
Bumping is completed prior to assembly. The process replaces wire bonding as the interconnection by applying solder, in the form of bumps, or balls, to a device at the wafer level, according to TI. Gartner’s Freeman explained that bumping is “one of the many packaging methods for devices and tends to be the favored manufacturing method for wafer level packaging.”

Fego sees bumping as an “absolutely critical” manufacturing process for advanced packaging technologies.

Because bumping comes in so many different flavors, the process leverages proprietary technologies that help differentiate analog chips. A certain flavor of bumping is used to improve speed in embedded chips, for example, while another delivers the smaller size or thinness needed by higher density chips, Fego explained.

TI’s new 300mm wafer bumping facility will accommodate a variety of bumping processes. “We will first establish a base technology, go through the learning curve, and offer bumping our customers’ devices need,” Fego said.

China strategy
TI rolled out its China plan in earnest when the company acquired in 2010 a 200mm fab in Chengdu, from China’s foundry SMIC and the Chinese government. TI is using that fab to produce analog chips. 

TI then added an assembly/test operation in China by purchasing a 358,000 square-foot facility from UTAC Chengdu Ltd. in December, 2013. The facility is now qualified and in production using advanced quad-flat no-leads (QFN) packaging technology, according to TI.

For the company’s new 300mm wafer bumping facility, TI is using a second shell that came with the Chengdu site TI purchased back in 2010. The facility, remaining still as a shell today, is scheduled to begin production in early 2016.

TI has manufacturing operations throughout the world, including the United States, Mexico, Germany, Scotland, China, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Its 300mm operations include the industry’s first 300mm Analog wafer fab in Richardson, Texas as well as its DMOS6 wafer fab in Dallas and bump operations in the Philippines and Dallas.

By: DocMemory
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