Site:

Institute of Microelectronics (IME)
11 Science Park Rd., Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117685

Participants:

Dr. Robert C. F. Tsai, Associate Director
Wallace Lim, Senior Marketing Officer
Dr. S. Navin Bhandarkar, Technical Staff

Mission and Strategy

NSTB started IME in 1991. IME's mission and objectives are to help increasing value-added from electronics industries in Singapore by engaging in relevant R&D over selected (strategic) fields in microelectronics, supporting and partnering with electronics industries, and developing skilled R&D personnel.

Key Elements of Presentation

IME focuses on 4 areas of activities across 6 business units:

ACTIVITIES

1. Advanced services
2. Silicon microelectronics applications
3. Miniaturization for portable electronics
4. Training

BUSINESS UNITS

1. Optical and magnetic
2. Micromachining and sensors
3. Mixed-signal designs
4. Advanced packaging development
5. Deep sub micron
6. VLSI

Key elements

IME currently has a team of 140 scientists and staff (two-thirds of whom have post-graduate degrees) and $26 million of equipment. IME actively recruits talent from around the world, including the U.S., but has a difficult time retaining top level researchers due to the high demand in the local region for this skill level.

Key results

Advanced packaging activities focus on flip chip, ball grid array, and chip size packages.

Conclusions

IME has failure analysis equipment including focused ion beam, transmission electron microscope, and atomic force microscope. Skills to operate and interpret the results have been obtained from Motorola, Bell Labs., etc.