Archived Webinars

TASA ID: 12079

One of the most important decisions to be made by counsel in any litigation is which expert or experts to retain. A primary consideration in this decision is to determine whether there are any potential specialties or sub-specialties involved that are of importance to your case. For instance, in a product liability case involving a consumer appliance, an expert who has had experience in the design and manufacture of similar appliances might be a more appropriate candidate as an expert than one who has not been so involved with these products or processes.

TASA ID: 11532

There are references in American history to early business relationships which, while possibly not meeting the current FTC definition, were without a doubt, franchise/licensing relationships. These relationships existed in the selling of wares from town-to-town by peddlers, licenses granted for general stores at military outposts, and certain livestock sales and other goods in which exclusive territorial rights were granted to the "franchisees" by the holder of the rights. Unfortunately, while the relationships are mentioned in the literature, the names of these early franchise founders and the structure of the business arrangement are not. 

Throughout its long history, there have been four constants that have fueled the growth of franchising, the desire to expand, the lack of expansion capital, the need to overcome distance, and managing people from a distant location.

The use of franchising can be traced to the expansion of the church and as an early method of central government control, probably as far back as the Middle Ages. Some have written that it may indeed date back as far as the Roman Empire or earlier and given the necessity of large territorial controls, coupled with the lack of modern transportation and communication at the time, there is reasonable basis for this assumption.

TASA ID: 4595

The dominant process for interconnecting semiconductor chips to the outside world is an ultrasonic welding process called wire bonding. More than 90% of the chip interconnections produced annually (more than 15 trillion wires) are produced with this process. Welding is a process where an intermetallic alloy is formed from the materials to be joined. Generally, intermetallic alloys are stronger and also more brittle than their constituents.  Welding is superior to other joining methods, such as soldering which require that a low melting temperature material melt and solidify within the joint. Low melting temperature materials, such as solders have significantly lower strength and are more subject to creep and fatigue failures than intermetallics.

TASA ID: 4595

As new high-speed products with ever-increasing capabilities are developed and introduced into the market, new advanced IC packaging designs and methods also must be developed to meet these new products’ requirements. New advanced packages are being designed to maximize I/O numbers, minimize wire bond loop length, and provide System-In-Package (SiP) performance. Stacked die packages, providing (SiP) performance, are already the mainstream of cellular phone manufacturing. Wire bonded Lead-On-Chip (LOC, FBGA) packages are the largest production volume portion of the DDR I memory market, and will be the dominant package type through the DDR II generation¹. 

TASA ID: 4595

The wire bond pull test and shear test are widely used to evaluate and control the quality of ball bonds—fine pitch and otherwise. The shear test is the only method that adequately evaluates the strength of the weld. The pull test cannot test the weld because the welded cross section is normally significantly larger and stronger than that of the wire.