Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1529988
14 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2024 Do you offer photonic soldering as an occasional service? Can someone use it as an outside service when they need it? We like to sell equipment, of course, and some- times the process to get there involves doing work at our facility. We generally will offer a day or two with no charge for those who are com- ing to our facility to understand the impact and how it aligns with their particular kind of work. at's relationship building, and validating the technology. Come see us in Austin. Bring some samples, we'll get lunch, and see how the equip- ment works with your concept and your materi- als. We always encourage people to bring more samples than they think they'll need because we can move through them very quickly. When you see photonic soldering in person, it's more impactful than you might think. We also do test drives for a couple of days vs. buying the tool outright. Sometimes, the eval- uation consists of a few days or weeks of pro- gram development effort, and we put together a reasonable quote package that makes sense. We oen see transitions into our technology, so we draw up a 100% lease-to-buy program. is can be extremely helpful because those initial funds oen come out of an operating budget instead of a capital equipment budget. en when it becomes a capital equipment project, it's a lower capital equipment price, so everyone wins. We're just trying to get the tool into the customer's facility. Once the tool gets to a customer, then other groups can see and use it. If they're an EMS provider, other customers can see the kinds of work it can do. at's where awareness propagates. You've been working with semiconductor applications. Do they use your technology for direct wafer bonding? at's exactly the application that we've been working on: advanced packaging. Even before we started with our In-Line tool set—which launched just before the pandemic—we had customers in Japan interested in delaminat- ing, debonding, temporary die attach, and then reattachment projects. ere were also projects related to wafer thinning and wafer processing. One application involves micro-LEDs. Plac- ing those micro-LEDs off a wafer and onto a sub- strate for a display can be very challenging. We realized that temporary debonding was a beach- head application in the semiconductor space. We can't pick-and-place every single one of these lit- tle guys onto the display one-by-one with any sort of reasonable time and accuracy, so our technology can do the whole lot as a batch. e wafers are held onto a carrier plate with an adhe- sive. e wafer is then processed, moved around, and strengthened through attachment to this carrier plate. Eventually, it needs to be removed from the carrier plate: Either the wafer needs to be removed from the carrier plate, or the remain- ing die aer removing the wafer needs to be removed from the carrier plate. I'm imagining the wafer attached to the carrier plate in such a way that those micro-LEDs are against the carrier plate. As you lift away the substrate, you're leaving all your components on the carrier plate in an orderly fashion. Right. Maybe you just want to thin the backside of the wafer, but you need some way to hold it while you do the thinning. ose are both viable use cases. At this point, the processing is com- plete and now you will take the wafer off. The PulseForge® Soldering In-Line, with NovaCentrix proprietary high-intensity thermal technology.