As a fabless semiconductor company, Tekmos outsources wafer fabrication and device assembly. The decision to outsource testing is more complicated. As a basic philosophy, Tekmos would prefer to do all testing in-house. This is driven by a need to control a major component of the manufacturing and to insure that our customer’s priorities are being met. But we occasionally get either product types or package types which we cannot do in-house, and so we outsource the testing of those parts. The deciding factors are a combination of pin-count and package type.
Our largest tester has 320 data channels and can support parts up to about 400 pins. If the pin count is higher than that, we will have to either design a custom tester, or outsource testing.
The package type and its associated volume is another factor in deciding to outsource. Any part can be manually tested, but manual testing is slow, and so we only use it for low volume parts. Higher volume parts have a lower cost, and are more sensitive to the test cost. Tekmos has a number of handlers, and tape and reel machines, but we don’t have the capability for tray-fed tape and reel. Or at least we didn’t until last month.
In the last year, we have seen a large increase in our consumer products volume. And since most consumer ICs are QFN devices that are sold in a Tape & Reel format, we have needed to increase our T&R capacity. Our current machines are tube fed, but we needed to get one that was tray fed to handle the QFN packages. So, we purchased a second Tape and Reel machine.
Our new machine has a capacity of about 2000 units per hour, which translates to about 15K units per day with a single shift of operation. It also has an optical inspection capability, that checks to make sure that the package is orientated correctly in the tape before it is sealed.
Now that we have fixed our tape and reel capacity issue, our next capacity problem is in the area of QFN handlers. And I will address that in another article.