A few of years ago, "Wire Bonding in Microelectronics" seemed less relevant to electric circuit board assembly than it does today. It's primary utility was for those involved in back end of the line integrated circuit and other semiconductor component assembly and failure analysis laboratories. Today, the wider acceptance and use of multichip modules and chip on board technologies as main stream technologies make this book an important tool for practitioners in electric circuit board assembly.

Mr. Harmon assumes the basics of operating wire bonding equipment are well understood. So only a small part of the book is elementary and it generally expects readers to be conversant in wire bonding, device packaging, hybrid, or multichip module circuit assembly technology. The book is well written, edited, and understandable without excessive amounts of jargon, regardless of the audience. The primary focus is failure mechanisms and yield problems originating from chip-to-package wire bonds, but other wire bonds are also considered. Here, Harmon instructs his readers in: understanding bonding technology, testing wire bonds, making reliable bonds at a very high yield, bonding wires to multichip modules, solving common bonding problems, evaluating alternative bonding technologies, and using more effective cleaning techniques to improve bondability and reliability.

In reading "Wire Bonding in Microelectronics", it was interesting to learn that:

• Some wire-to-pad interfacial motion (scrubbing) occurs upon the first application of ultrasonic energy, resulting in some cleaning action of hard oxides from the aluminum IC pad with the bond wire.
• There actually is a reason for shelf life controlling bond wire.
• Integrated circuits can be damaged by fairly routine plasma cleaning.