Minneapolis, MN
To reward exceptional achievement at two recent SMTA (Minneapolis, MN) educational programs, Glenn Woodhouse, Plexus (formerly MCMS, Neenah, WI), and Janet Semmens, Sonoscan (Elk Grove Village, IL), were named winners of the Best of Conference Awards at the SMTA Dallas Optoelectronics conference and the Seventh Annual Pan Pacific Symposium, respectively.
Woodhouse was awarded the SMTA Dallas Best of Conference Paper Award for his work entitled Photonics Assembly in an EMS Environment. While the explosion of the Internet has driven phenomenal growth in networking hardware requirements, the trend has required original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to turn to the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) industry as a way to quickly and efficiently satisfy manufacturing needs. The paper introduces readers to photonic components, associated assembly and test processes and the unique manufacturing challenges and paradigm shift faced by manufacturers focused surface-mount technology.
Semmens received the Pan Pacific Symposium Best of Conference Paper Award for her article entitled Acoustic Micro Imaging in the Fourier Domain for Evaluation of Advanced Packaging. With the evolution of smaller microelectronic devices and higher I/O counts, sizes of features have become increasingly smaller and layer thickness has become increasingly thinner. These factors have pushed the development of higher frequency imaging in acoustic micro imaging (AMI) to increase the available resolution in both the spatial (x-y) and axial (z) dimensions. Semmens' work specifically described case studies where FFT frequency domain imaging has been used to reveal features down to only Angstroms in thickness, which is substantially below the accepted wavelength limit of the resolution, in applications such as wafer bonding and flip chips.