Nippon Steel Materials Expands Bonding Copper Wire Capacity

Nippon Steel’s electronic materials making subsidiary, Nippon Steel Materials announced on Tuesday the subsidiary, Nippon Micrometal Group established monthly 150,000 kilometers of palladium coated copper wire production capacity at the domestic 2 plants and Philippine plant to supply major part of world bonding wire demand for large scale integration packaging.

Bonding wire to connect LSI and outer electrode is made traditionally from gold. Many attempts to switch from gold to copper were failed. Nippon Steel Materials succeeded the mass production of the copper wire, EX1, which was developed by Advanced Technology Research Laboratories of Nippon Steel. The copper wire can be applied to ultra fine pitch LSI.

The firm launched the copper wire in April 2009. The copper wire has advantage in a third to a fourth of cost benefit compared with gold wire while the copper wire cleared traditional demerits of copper wire including oxidization, bondability and heat resistance.

The firm already got order for the copper wire from more than 20 plants of the world class users. The copper wire is already used for LSI package with high pin count and multi layers. The firm decided the expansion to meet the growing demand.