Development of a process for hermetic resistance welding of microelectronics packages using Taguchi experimental design techniques

The use of Taguchi experimental design techniques to develop a one-shot resistance welding process for sealing microelectronics packages is discussed. After evaluation, four factors (process parameters) and three interactions between the factors were selected for analysis. The Taguchi L8 array used for the evaluation required eight experiments. Two devices were sealed in each of the experiments and were subjected to fine and gross leaky hermeticity testing according to MIL-STD-883. A second four-experiment evaluation was run to optimize the parameters selected in the first evaluation, and then a confirmation run of 10 devices was assembled. All devices from the second evaluation and the conformation run passed lead check and looked good visually. To date, 70 out of 71 devices sealed using this process passed lead check (99% yield)