Layout design on bond pads to improve the firmness of bond wire in packaged IC products

During the manufacture of IC products, the breaking of bond wires or the peeling of bond pads occurs frequently and thus results in the open circuit phenomenon in the IC's. There are several methods proposed to overcome this problem, but additional special process flows are desired for all of these previous methods. This paper presents a layout design method to improve the bond wire reliability in a standard CMOS process. By changing the layout patterns on the bond pads, the firmness of bond wires on the bond pads can be improved. One set of layout patterns on the bond pads has been designed and fabricated in a 0.6 /spl mu/m IP3M CMOS process for the ball shear test and the wire pull test. By implementing the effective layout designs in IC products, the bond wire reliability can be obviously improved in a standard CMOS process.