Introduction

Abstract

Developments in the semiconductor industry, along with consumer demand for cheaper, lighter, high-density information processing tools, have in effect revolutionized the entire electronic packaging infrastructure. The information processing task could be as mundane as placing a telephone call to as complex as global telecommunication or handling international airline traffic or multinational bank transactions and accounting. The consequence of this demand has been the rapid development of high-density, high-function semiconductor devices with ever increasing functionality packaged into smaller and smaller devices. Developments in semiconductor technology have resulted in very large scale integration devices with attendant feature sizes as small as a 0.3 to 0.2 microns and very high input/ output (I/O) counts. The devices are then packaged to enable attachment to the printed circuit board. These are also called components.