India's OSAT Revolution: A Long-time Coming
Outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing (OSAT) facilities are popping up on the news quite frequently in recent times. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India (MeitY) has approved, till publishing date, 8 packaging facilities. Heavyweights like Micron, HCL, Foxconn, and domestic companies like Continental Devices India Ltd. (CDIL) have invested a lot of money on these up and coming manufacturing plants. What are these facilities and what do they do? Let us dive into this question and come up with some answers. Figure 1: Description of semiconductor manufacturing flow. Semiconductor fabrication has two main fabrication areas; namely the front-end and the back-end. The frontend deals with manufacturing the circuits on the wafer. The processes that are covered here are: deposition , lithography , etching , chemical-mechanical polishing, and doping . The wafer remains intact in this stage and will be sent for packaging. This is where an assembly, testing, mark...