Nippon Steel Materials Offers Cu Bonding Wire License Tanaka Denshi Kogyo

Nippon Steel Materials and its subsidiary, Nippon Micro Metal announced on Wednesday the firms offers license to its patent of palladium coated copper bonding wire for large scale integration circuit, EX1 to Japanese major bonding wire maker, Tanaka Denshi Kogyo. The firms try to increase copper bonding wire while gold wire has more than 80% share of world’s bonding wire market.

Copper bonding wire rate is about 15% of world’s bonding wire market, which surged from about 2% in 2007. The firms see copper wire rate would increase to about 50% in 2013 and palladium coated copper wire rate would increase to 35%.

Gold bonding wire is shifting to low-priced copper wire when gold price increased to around 4 times in past 10 years. However, the users are concerned about short lifetime from copper corrosion.

Nippon Steel Materials and Nippon Micro Metal improved performance of the copper wire by palladium coating to be used for LSI circuit and launched the world’s first commercial production in 2009. The price of palladium coated copper wire, EX1 is about one fifth of the gold wire. EX1 dominates more than 80% of shares in palladium copper wire.

Nippon Micro Metal increased monthly EX1 production capacity at its plants in Japan and Philippines to 250,000 kilometers from 150,000 km at the beginning of 2011. The firm plans to increase the capacity more.