Electronics Industry Awards
Bringing manufacturing back to the UK
With over 36 years of electronics assembly experience, CIL has opened an entirely new 64,000 sq ft site; known as BP2, it houses the UK’s largest semiconductor packaging facility.
T
his highly automated factory also includes both a volume PCBA production area with three full auto SMT PCBA assembly lines and a 15,000 sq ft semiconductor
packaging ISO 7 clean room.
The new BP2 site’s three high-volume SMT PCBA production lines are complemented by the established CIL House facility both in Andover UK, which houses a dedicated rapid prototype SMT PCBA line and a further four production SMT PCBA lines for small to medium volumes of complex PCBA assemblies. The combined facilities allow CIL to support customers throughout their entire product lifetime, from initial concept development and prototyping, through early low and medium volume production runs, and on to full high- volume production.
CIL’s BP2 semiconductor assembly clean room contains a segregated area to house wafer dicing capability complete with dicing saw, water treatment and wafer mounting equipment. The sawn die is then moved into the packaging assembly area, where the bare dies are mounted on the PCBA using a conductive or non-conductive epoxy and then wire bonded. Wire counts vary from a single wire bond up to 1000 per device and CIL currently performs approximately 1.5M wire bonds per week. These wire bonded die are then 100 per cent encapsulated (glob top), part encapsulated, or left completely exposed. In the reverse scenario, a wafer dicing/sawing process within the semiconductor packaging
Primarily, the answer lies in very high levels of automation. When a production line needed 20 technicians on European wages to operate successfully, the wage bill ruled out competitiveness with the Far East. But this problem becomes insignificant at CIL’s level of automation, where a complete SMT line is run by just two operators.
CIL’s BP2 three high volume SMT PCBA Assembly lines all with in-line 3D AOI
clean room is used to singulate wafers into individual die. They are then die / wire bonded onto a leadframe and then go through CIL’s plastic overmold process. These completed custom QFN SMT packages are then laser marked, separated and moved into CIL’s BP2 SMT assembly area for SMT placement onto their respective PCBA. In this instance the customer is supplying custom wafers, and CIL is performing the full packaging and PCBA assembly service, all within the same facility in the UK. All of CIL’s OEM customers are engaged in delivering advanced technology products into demanding applications such as EVs, medical and multiple other markets. Although volumes are not as high as for consumer applications, they can still be considerable – BP2 is already placing 8 million components a month, with
a first-time pass rate >99.4 per cent. Of the 8 million components, 5 million of them are 0201 passives mixed with BGA’s and
John Boston, managing director of CIL, comments: “CIL’s ultimate strategy is to maximise and optimise our offering of prototype, small-, medium-, and high-volume PCBA and micro-electronics/power device assembly, all from one company. We have a planned growth trajectory across diverse industries and market conditions. “Expansion will continue, with more SMT PCBA production lines planned for BP2 in 2025. Also, over the coming years we will be adding further semiconductor packaging
CIL House 4 off SMT PCBA assembly lines for small – medium volume production CIL’s BP2 Semiconductor packaging team 50 November 2024 Components in Electronics
more importantly WLCSP / CSP’s, so highly complex assemblies. One medical application requires the entire assembly to have 100 per cent traceability. CIL records for a single PCBA assembly, every component used, 3D AOI results, in respect of the die, and wafer, die and lot numbers of all process materials consumed down to a single board. To achieve this, everything is bar coded and CIL relies on all of its latest assembly machines to read barcodes through the entire assembly process, from wafer dice, die/wire bond, encapsulation and SMT assembly.
technologies and processes to give our customers the technological lead they need to be successful. Overall, we are very proud of our BP2 investment, and how it is allowing us and our customers to counter the ever- increasing worldwide threat to our supply chain integrity. We also believe that our story will be encouraging to other UK electronics manufacturers, as we have proved that it’s possible to reduce dependence on overseas semiconductor suppliers.”
https://www.cil-uk.co.uk/ www.cieonline.co.uk.uk
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