Industrial Training First Day (5-4-2010)

Today was a mentally exhausting beginning to my industrial training. Time seems not to budge. Luckily I was sufficiently pertinacious in keeping myself awake from 8.30am till 5.30pm.

Customarily, the first day would be designated for introductions. I was first introduced to the organizational chart by my supervisor, Mr. Melvin. He is an amicable and helpful person. His concise, animated and lucid explanations not only alleviated my anxiety, but also had imbued me with fundamental information about the operation of NXP Semiconductor.

Basically, this company is a breakaway department from Philips which specializes in semiconductor manufacturing. Some of the terms mentioned were totally unfamiliar as those were not covered in any of the lectures in UNITEN before. For instance, wafer fab, die bonding, wire bonding and so forth.

As an brief overview, this company industrial processes can be divided into three categories, namely front end, middle end and back end. In the front end process, silicon ingots of exceedingly low impurities will undergo sawing process, culminating in disc-like wafer fabs. Each piece of this wafer usually impregnates thousands of individual units, deemed as dies. Each die will then undergo die bonding process, to be followed by wire bonding process.

Then, in the mid end section, molding and plating of the dies on lead frames will be conducted. While in the back end section, processes involved are trimming, testing, marking, forming, taping, to be followed by prepacking, quality assuring and finally shipping or delivery of end products.

Apart from the aforementioned introduction narrated by Mr. Melvin, he also took me for several horizon-broadening visits to their assembly lines in which I was inundated with awe as the sight of sophisticated, impeccable machines appeared in front of me. Every employee that enters this assembly line, which composed of front end, mid end and back end, is required to wear special attire. This is to mitigate the baneful effects of our body's electrostatic charges on the semiconductors.

Besides that, I was asked to look up the internet as well as the company's intranet to gain knowledge on semiconductor manufacturing involving wafer fabs. I was also introduced to miscellaneous probable defects of the semiconductor. For example, exposed wires, contaminated dies, cracked wafers, pimples, scratched wafers and so forth.

That's all from me. I hope there could be more breaks in between the working hours as it was really mentally tormenting for me to stare at the computer whole day long. For your information, the lunch break is the only break we are having, and it is only just a paltry 45 minutes.