Press Room

Santa Clara, California, October 29, 2002 – Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Incorporated (ASE) (TAIEX: 2311, NYSE: ASX), one of the world’s largest semiconductor packaging and testing companies, announced today that its 300mm wafer flip chip bumping line is ready for volume production. ASE has already completed development of its 300mm wafer solder bumping technology in November of 2001 and installed a fully automated bumping line in December. During the first two quarters of 2002, customers conducted extensive qualification tests on reliability and quality at the ASE manufacturing facility.

Despite the current downturn, chipmakers and foundries continue to invest in 300mm wafer fabs. According to Semico Research Corp’s recent report, 300mm capability will grow during the next few years to about 45% of total wafer production by the year 2006. The migration to 300mm wafers have been largely due to the increased difficulties of reducing per-die costs with shrinking feature size. 300mm wafers will benefit complex, high end logic devices such as MPUs, DSPs, ASICs and FPGAs whereby savings can be achieved in per-die production cost.

Wafer bumping is an essential process for flip chip packaging, and ASE’s wafer bumping technology has been applied on 150mm and 200mm wafers for many years. Its 200mm wafer bumping technology has consistently attained a yield rate of 99% at a monthly output of 20, 000wafers and is qualified by major IDMs (independent device manufacturers). “With industry migration to 300mm, ASE is already moving ahead by establishing processes and equipment to handle these larger wafers, ” said J.J. Lee, vice president of Research and Development, ASE Group. ASE now offers customers complete 300mm wafer packaging and testing services including substrate design and fabrication, bumping, wafer sorting, flip chip packaging and final test.