Packaging: Dieter Bergman
Aspiring to a higher standard

The business of electronics packaging is perhaps more intertwined and simultaneously competitive than a lot of other segments of the electronics industry. International competition is intense, yet there's a growing amount of data sharing between countries.

Standards are critical for both time-to-market and for cost, since most system designers cannot afford proprietary IC packages or circuit boards that require special technologies. At the same time, pricing pressures are so severe that the hundreds of U.S. board producers don't have time for much advanced research, even though they need to adopt new materials and processes to keep pace with the soaring clock rates of semiconductors.

In this swirling sea of contradictions and competitions, Dieter Bergman is perhaps one of the most recognized people. Known as a tireless worker in several worlds he inhabits, he's technical director of the erstwhile Institute for In-terconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits in Northbrook, Ill., which recently dropped that name and opted to use only its well-known IPC initials. For 25 years, he has spearheaded IPC efforts to create standards and make the world more aware of the importance of the packaging industry. Bergman is involved in nearly every standard the IPC works on, and he's the circuit-board industry's representative in several other U.S. groups like the Electronic Industry Association, as well as a U.S. rep for international standards.

In March, he'll even be in a standard. That's when the IPC holds a 25th anniversary roast for Bergman, adding a definition to the IPC-T-50 [standard] that explains "What is a Dieter?"

In his tenure at the IPC, he's seen the trade association grow, moving from a tiny brick office with shared desks to a fancy multistory structure with associates scattered around the globe. The business of creating standards has also changed a lot.

The IPC and other agencies are now making it possible to create timely international standards, telescoping a multiyear time frame that often rendered international standards obsolete before they were printed.

"Last year the international standards publishers recognized that the rules needed to change, and we came up with what are called Publicly Available Specifications [PAS]," Bergman said. "When a specification in one country is ready, they send the proposed document to a committee and ask if they want to print it. The committee has two months to say yes or no. We took the J standard on flip chip a while ago as a PAS and the IEC [standards body] has already published it. Normally that process would have involved setting up a group of experts who would work on something two or three years before it went to draft and people started voting on it."

International cooperation is but one aspect of increased communications in the world of standards and the trade associations and consortia that help create them. These groups, acknowledging that none has expertise in all of the electronics industry's many aspects, have begun sharing more information.

"The technology road maps have been an outstanding thing because they bring industries together,"Bergman said. "They were started by the Semiconductor Industry Association, and they were helped by the IPC. Now the National Equipment Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) and the IPC are working together. We wrote a chapter for NEMI's interconnection road map."

These road maps point out the big changes that the packaging world will have to make in the next few years. Semiconductor makers are talking about I/O counts as high as 4,000, and it's a good bet that designers of these huge chips aren't going to use large lead spacings so it will be easy to route circuit-board traces to the thousands of solder balls that will be on the package.

That means circuit-board producers who make up the bulk of the IPC's membership will have to move well below the 5-mil lines and spaces of today's state-of-the-art boards. The copper traces on the FR-4 board material are running out of steam, so the board industry is beginning to study alternative techniques, focusing mainly on build-up materials that can be selectively added in areas where higher density is needed. Companies like IBM have been making these high-density interconnect (HDI) boards for a long time.

The need for HDI technology is being driven by the quick adoption of chip-scale packaging (CSP). To Bergman, the rapid emergence of CSP is the year's big story.

"In 1998, the most significant thing that's happened is the acceptance of the Tessera concept. A tiny company came up with the idea of putting a flexible circuit on a chip. [The idea] has been accepted by Motorola, TI, Intel and others," Bergman said. "Some companies might be doing it their own way, but however they do it, the concept has really taken off."

HDI is one of the main areas of research being done by the Interconnection Technology Research Institute (Austin, Texas), which was set up by the IPC to help the board industry perform advanced research in an era when companies like IBM and AT&T have cut back their long-term programs. Bergman feels that consortia will become more important in the packaging world as margins continue to shrink.

"Many companies have taken technology and processes to Asia, and they took things very seriously over there. They spent a lot of money on research," Bergman said. "In our country, profit margins are so low that a lot of companies aren't able to do research. As processor speeds go up, the electronic performance of raw materials becomes more critical. People at almost every level have to understand that and adapt to the changes."

The funding received by groups like ITRI and NEMI are one way that the industry is recognizing the need to stay at the forefront of technology. Another is the closer interaction between companies.

"At the end of the '90s, we have an enlightened industry that realizes the importance of supply-chain relationships," Bergman said.

Further evidence is the acceptance of standards that span various industries. The IPC's GenCAM specifications, which provide a common way of moving data from the CAE tools used in design to the CAM programs used to set up factory equipment, are an example of this interreliability. All these changes are being helped by one of the era's hot buttons: the Internet.

"The Web and e-mail make it so much easier to communicate with a number of people," Bergman said. "That's one of the enabling technologies."

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