Dean, We did many assemblies with the Westbond 7200's [which are likely no longer available], but they worked very well when either manually dispensing adhesive and placing die, or when using pre-adhesive screened substrates. I've seen a few of them on the used equipment market - just keep on ticking. Nothing against the others, if they appear to suit your clients needs. If just picking and placing die, they should get 200-250 placements per hour, best case. All depends on design, die, etc. With the proper substrate layout [visual cues/design rules] the operators could easily get device location within +/- 0.002" of nominal. Theta was typically less than 2-5°, depending on size of die and relationship to die attach pad. All of this shows up very quickly at the automatic wirebonders, if the devices are inconsistently placed! My recommendation is that when using any of the manual machines to keep your mind open for fixturing that best suits the users situation. For example, we enlarged the 'work table' to prevent accidental fall-offs of the work holders. The standard work holder typically only held one 2x2" waffle pack. We made some for holding 3 2x2's. Also made some when working with vac release gel packs. Because of the throat of the machine, one could only use [at most] 2 4x4" waffle packs, and that was rare because the substrates were typically just as large. Most of my eutectic work was done on more specialized machines that are no longer available. Recommend that the eutectic bonders have good collet heating capability and offer [as a minimum] adjustable mechanical scrub of the die collet, if not the option for ultrasonic scrub. 'Cover gas' and 'cover gas blanketing' gets a 'show me it works first' response. Some end up pulling more oxidizing air in then they exclude. With oxidizing alloys, a touch of ultrasonics does help to break up and disperse the oxides a bit. Mechanical scrub can do the same thing, but is more operator sensitive. Also somewhat dependent on nature of substrate - thick film vs plated vs vacuum metalized glazed substrates, for example. Obviously, need good temp control over stage heat too.. Depending on their flow and product, a good pre-heat of regulated duration can also be a big plus. If you require extreme placement accuracy, such as for laser facet to fiber alignment, we need to have an entirely different discussion. Steve Creswick Sr Associate - Balanced Enterprise Solutions http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevencreswick 616 834 1883 -----Original Message----- From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stadem, Richard D. Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 8:41 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [TN] Die Bonders I am looking at purchasing 3 or 4 manual die bonding machines. I do not have much experience in this process. My client will be using them to perform eutectic gold/tin die bonding immediately, but they know they will also be using epoxy die bonding in the near future. Some of the machines we are looking at are Hybond, Westbond, and Tresky, as an example. Let me know which machines you recommend. I am looking for recommendations from other experienced users. You folks have served me very well when I purchased the plasma cleaning equipment and wirebonders for these clients recently. We are now on the third and final phase of purchasing, qualification, and production startup, and they are working great! Please send me any information offline by sending a response to this email; [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Thank you so much for any feedback you can provide. dean ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. For more information please contact helpdesk at x2960 or [log in to unmask] ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. For more information please contact helpdesk at x2960 or [log in to unmask] ______________________________________________________________________