In recent years, the electronic industry has been faced with the need to make strategic decisions in the selection of packaging technologies, to create robust designs that will be insensitive to changes in the assembly process, to evaluate the impact of different types of equipment in the assembly and test areas, and to perform make or buy decisions. The design for manufacturing (DFM) concept has created a significant effort in the cost analysis of the overall product from the beginning of die fabrication to the fully assembled and tested module as a means to evaluate different options in packaging technologies, assembly and test processes, and equipment selection. This paper presents a method of performing the cost analysis by taking into account the process yield at each step of the process sequence and how the yield at different steps impacts the overall cost of the module. Most discussions in this paper pertain to the module assembly portion of the electronic assembly (assembling a finished package to a module), but the methodology could be applied to any process sequence. The scope of this paper is to outline the methodology of modeling the process and how to use the outputs from the process models to evaluate the different constituents of the module cost.
