![An old school flatpak IC. [4032x3024 - 2.59MB]](https://pic8.co/sh/d2ymSE.jpg){kind=link}
We were manufacturing these flat packs in the 1980s for Mil-Aero. They were placed in plastic carriers in order to process them through automated test. During test, these carriers sometimes came apart because of the vibrating bowls that fed the tester and the devices would fly out of the carriers, through the air and stick in the ceiling tiles 10ft above the handlers.
The handlers we used "back in the day" were called Pegasus Handlers, IIRC. They used a vibrating bowl to Orient and feed the ICs to the tester.
Example vibrating bowl feeder (machinio.com)
I think they were hand setting dies in these.
Hand setting the packaged ICs in these carriers. The die bonding, stitching and hermetic sealing (glass, IIRC) were all automated processes.
Example Carrier - https://www.sensata.com/products/semiconductor-interconnect/1-14-x-1-14-one-piece-flatpacks
These were never meant for production, and they came from a university lab. So most of the work was probably done by hand.
How was the catastrophic failure resolved?
The plastic carriers required manually inserting the IC in the carrier and inserting a plastic "window" which had incredibly small plastic clips that would lock the IC in the carrier. This was a manual process by humans, thus prone to error (windows not fully snapped into place). The error rate wasn't too bad, usually less than 1% failure. Certain vibrating bowl handlers with a vertical ramp (towards the ceiling) and ~180° radius back down toward the DUT interface were the most problematic. I think the mfg floor phased out those problematic handlers, eventually the flat pack package became somewhat obsolete with the advent of smaller, lighter surface mount packaging options.
Neat!
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