Tessera Packaging Offering

Advanced Imaging Pro: "We've taken Shellcase's existing technologies and evolved it into a thinner package, almost halving it from about 900 µm to 500 µm," said Mitch Reifel, Tessera's manager of business development. "This is a key concern in the image module industry, because smaller is better - just like everything else in the electronics industry."

And with this latest generation, the material set and design rules are all done at the wafer level. "We've narrowed the streets [width between the dies] from about 230 µm to 100 µm to yield more net die per wafer," Reifel said. "The material set was also changed, which should lower costs by roughly 10%."

Another significant change made was the improvement of the moisture sensitivity reliability from JEDEC MSL 2 to MSL 1. This allows the technology to be used in other applications, such as harsh automotive ones, which tend to have much higher reliability standards than the consumer imaging market.

"Essentially, we've made the package smaller, increased its reliability and made it less expensive, because these are all driving factors within the semiconductor packaging industry," Reifel said.

All this seems to be an extension of Shellcase products. Now I wonder how Digital Optics Corp.'s technology is related to these packages. So far Tessera has kept mum on this.

Mitch Reifel is a long time image sensors industry veteran. He was one of the founders of YMedia startup trying to offer the smallest pixels of the time (3um pixels in 2000). Then he worked for Amkor, while simultaniously publishing YMedia blog devoted to image sensors industry. He shut down his excellent blog at about the same time he joined Tessera in Nov. 2005.