Casio Micronics to sell gold-bumping equipment

TOKYO, JAPAN: Post suspension of operations of its gold bumping lines in April 2009, Japanese IC major Casio Micronics is now mulling over selling its gold-bumping equipment. The company was forced to suspend operations as it already had fallen into difficult times.

It is now being expected by the industry that Casio Micronics might outsource its gold-bumping production to Taiwan soon. Sources added that Taiwan's Chipbond Technology, in response to speculation about it buying Casio's equipment, has said it might consider purchasing the equipment if it came with outsourcing orders.

Chipbond said that it sees no urgent need to add gold-bumping equipment. It had earlier been reported that Renesas Technology had increased outsourcing for back-end services in an attempt to control costs.

According to Chipbond officials, the company has been seeing increased orders from Renesas technology during the second quarter of the year. Chipbond has already bought testers from Renesas for chip-on-film (cof) and chip-on-glass (cog) production to ease tight capacity.

The proposed sale of its gold bumping equipment is likely to give Casio Micronics more space considering the fact that it had been battling the slowdown phase.

The company which is into operations such as fitting digital devices with large-scale integrated circuits, has said that its business is focused on production of chip packages for power supply IC, sound source LSI, and other types of chips, in addition to the electrode processing for liquid crystal drivers.

The company’s core technologies include sputtering, photo lithography, etching, plating, and other chip production technology.