Wire Bonding

Wire bonding is the electrical engineering method of making the electrical connections between a semiconductor chip and its surrounding package or circuit board by attaching extremely fine wires, typically gold, aluminum or copper only tens of micrometers thick, from bond pads on the chip to corresponding leads on the package, usually using heat, pressure and ultrasonic energy to fuse each wire end in place. It remains the dominant chip-interconnection technique in semiconductor packaging because of its low cost, flexibility and the maturity of the automated wire-bonding machines that place tens of thousands of bonds per hour, even as alternative techniques such as flip-chip bonding have taken over in applications demanding higher connection density or speed.