The Company and Technology

The Company's vision is to maintain our leadership in microwave-based, semiconductor processing equipment for electronic component fabrication and packaging. The Company's mission is to:

assemble microwave-based processing equipment;

enter the integrated circuit, micro-electro-mechanical systems, and optical packaging market at the device level; and

become the standard high density, low pressure, localized bonding technique for the microelectronics industry.

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   Microwave Bonding Instruments, Incorporated (MBI) is a microchip assembly and packaging technology designer and equipment manufacturer. MBI offers integrated circuit (IC) manufacturers and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) designers a patented technology to hermetically stack microelectronic and optical components and increase the number of electrical interconnects. This will significantly increase device functionality, while reducing the size of the chips. MBI currently has three ongoing government R&D contracts for applications in next generation packaging. Present and previous commercial customer applications include inkjet packaging, optical component integration, and fuel cell prototype packaging.

   The Company sells equipment that solders or bonds silicon and quartz fiber optic lines directly with metallic contacts and interconnects. Since silicon and quartz are effectively transparent to microwave energy, we produce specially designed microwave chambers that locally concentrate the heating energy only onto lithographically patterned metal lines, that are used to form hermetic silicon-to-silicon (or quartz) bonds. Microwave bonding is being positioned as a substitution technology for ball-grid array (BGA) and wire bonding, especially in multi-wafer, stacked bonding applications. By eliminating the need of soldering material between the silicon and the interconnect boards, and integrating vertically, the microchip manufacturers will save space on the chip, as well as have increased flexibility for "system on a chip"-type MEMS designs.