We learned just today that the contract from ASI to support
production work in
Tower A: is now in the hands of I&T
Tower B: in transit to SLAC, to arrive this Sunday.
Tower 1: all trays are assembled and in
Tray Assembly: work is in progress on assembly of Tower-2 trays at G&A.
MCMs:
- The trace cracking problem was resolved. The root cause of the drastic change in performance was an unknown change by the vendor from electrolytic plating to non-electrolytic nickel. The latter is far more brittle.
- Teledyne production has restarted. The first wire bonding was done yesterday.
- Acoustic microscopy of test pieces still show delamination of the encapsulation after cool-down from the cure, even after changing the process to eliminate silicone contamination. We do not know yet whether the delamination will be enough to break the wire bonds, but expecting the worst, we are proceeding with development of tooling to install covers over the chips in place of encapsulation. That could be phased into production in maybe a month’s time.
- We completed the design of new tooling for pitch-adapter bonding, and the first article is being machined. We expect to phase that into the production in a few weeks time.
- MOSIS is giving a good lead time on the production of more ASICs, with wafers due the end of March. Production of more pitch adapters and printed wiring boards remains tight and just-in-time. We now have two vendors supplying pitch adapters (Parlex and Dyconex).