Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1181966
52 SMT007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2019 it was made in, and so on. This might become necessary to better evaluate product recalls. Johnson: What is changing with manufactur- ing and the medical sector? Khan: First, I'll address how manufacturing is changing, and then I will loop back to the medical sector. Traditionally, there are com- ponents with standard packaging, like the ICs that you buy from companies like Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. This surface-mount technology and through-hole technology have been around for a long time. They are stable and time-proven technolo - gies because all of the nuances are known. What is coming to fruition is the fact that everything is shrink- ing from the size of the board to the size of the components; every- thing is becoming portable, hand- held, and wearable. The real estate on the PCB itself, as well as for the components, is becoming a prized commodity. The packages that were glass, ceramic, or aluminum are changing and going away. They are removing the packages and put- ting the dies directly onto the PCB or substrate. This gives you an enormous amount of real- estate savings, as well as gives you precise con- nectivity, but it comes at a price. For things like stacked wire bonding (Figure 1), die attach, flip chip, and so on, these are the upcoming tech- nologies of the future that are used typically for handheld devices. If you look at handheld and wearable devices, like watches, there are wire bonding and die attach packages in it. Regardless of what man- ufacturing sector we are going to be talking about, fine microelectronics packaging is now required. You put the die directly onto the sub- strate or PCB and do the wire bonding. Some- times, you have to encapsulate the dies using glob top (Figure 2). I've talked about some of those in my previous columns. Manufacturing is also moving toward IoT, wearable devices, and Bluetooth-enabled technology in medical as well as in consumer, aerospace, commer- cial, and pretty much every sector. Second, technology is changing at the fast- est pace ever in recent history and becoming more powerful. In today's everyday devices— such as smartphones—the sensors, cameras, MEMs, etc., are becoming so good that they're surpassing conventional handheld cameras from a few years ago. In the healthcare sec- tor, I see an upcoming "digital medical revo- Figure 1: Stacked wire bonding is more complex than regular wire bonding and requires extra precision. Figure 2: Glob top epoxy is used to encapsulate and protect bare dies.