Development, implementation, and analysis of direct integration offline programming method

Wire bond programming (WBP) consists of information required to drive a wire bond machine’s movement during the wire bonding process. Wire bond programs consist of three key components: material handling, bonding parameter, and bonding path instructions. Of the three components, the bonding path component requires effort and time the most to prepare, as the preparation of bond path is currently being carried out manually. The manual process is tedious and error prone. In comparison to a manual process, offline programming (OLP) of bonding path creation provides a much more reliable and a less tedious method as it is error proof. OLP can be categorized into two versions, mainly vendor specific OLP and direct integration offline programming (Di-OLP), which is presented in this paper. Vendor specific OLP utilizes bonding diagrams created by a computer-aided design program to generate wire bonding paths. Di-OLP on the other hand utilizes the numeric coordinate data extracted from the bonding diagram creation software to generate the bonding path component of the wire bond program. Di-OLP is a more flexible method as it has the potential to be adapted to different machine platforms. This paper explains the challenges in the implementation of Di-OLP. The effectiveness and efficiency of the program created by Di-OLP are evaluated as compared to a manual programming method. Final results indicate that the offline programming is more efficient as it greatly reduces the time required to create the bonding paths for wire bond programs as compared to the manual methodology.