News in 3D: the plot thickens at ECTC

Gossip flies at industry events. But usually as soon as someone tells me something juicy, they follow up with “but you can’t write about that yet.” Do you realize how hard that is? When, WHEN can I tell? Other times, I guess the answer, and can tell I’ve hit the nail on the head by the silent response and look on the interviewee’s face. But still, I’m sworn to secrecy with the promise of being the first to know when the news is ready to go public. I’ve got a few things under my hat at the moment. I’ve been sitting on one scoop for the better part of a year now.

It’s much more fun to be given the inside story and be the first to tell it. For example, I get to be the first to formally announce that Kathy Cook, previously of SUSS MicroTec, has joined Alchimer as business development manager. We talked about recent accomplishments (as in yesterday) for Alchimer, which involved proving thermal reliability of electrografting copper seed on titanium nitrite. According to Frédéric Raynal, product development manager for Alchimer, this is significant because the availability of reliability information has been an obstacle in achieving customer specifications. So the company had a third party perform reliability tests. So far, after 500 thermal cycles, thermal reliability was achieved from -55°C to 125°C. Results of 1000 cycle reliability tests will be available in June.

Additionally, at SEMICON West this year, Alchimer will launch the full AquiVia line , building on last year’s launch of egViaCoat, which replaces the dry PVD process for applying a seed layer on TSVs with electrografting, which is a wet process. The AquiVia “trilogy” completes the wet process, replacing conventional dry process flow for insulation (CVD), barrier (PVD/CVD/ALD), and seed (PVD) layers with proprietary wet-based electrografting, chemical grafting, and electrografting processes, respectively.Remember, you heard it here first. There I feel much better now. – F.v.T.