Participants The country membership today has more than 50 participating countries, including the entire world's major trading nations and a number of industrializing countries. The Subcommittee focused on package outlines is the IEC's SC-47D. Many of the IEC committees reflect the same functional areas as the JEDEC (www.jedec.org) committees (see table for a partial list).
Standards Organizations The TC47 WG-2 prepares semiconductor packaging standard test methods, which is exactly what is done by JEDEC's JC-14.1. Several other IEC committees work on standards that can impact packaging configurations, test methods and quality/reliability requirements. The IEC works differently than the JEDEC committees. In IEC one country has one vote, unlike JEDEC where one company has one vote. The IEC nor-mally meets twice annually to discuss new proposals and review the present balloting results. Balloting The IEC has four basic stages of balloting. Since the IEC meetings are international, and their meeting schedule is twice a year, the balloting cycle can easily be two to three years in length. The IEC management group is working on ways to cut this cycle time by half to meet the needs of the semiconductor market. To become an active member of the USA delegation for IEC TC47 or other subcommittees, the USA national committee (ANSI) must appoint the candidate. To qualify, the candidate must first be an active member of a related JEDEC committee, and must be willing to work with the USA's chief delegate and technical advisor to support the IEC standards balloting activities. Standardization of U.S. package outlines, test methods and quality/reliability requirements takes place in the JEDEC (JC-11 and JC-14) committees, while the Japanese standards are formulated by the Electronic Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ) committees. The JEDEC and EIAJ committees work together on new standards. The two committees meet at least annually and, in some cases, every six months on critical new technology standards. JEDEC and EIAJ work very hard to harmonize their committees' inputs to drive to one and only one standard. It is not unusual, therefore to see the same basic standard in both JEDEC and EIAJ publications. The final step in standardization is to make the newly created standard accepted internationally. In the U.S., the problem is that only four domestic companies lend any support to IEC's semiconductor standardization. This lack of support does not allow all the U.S. specifications to be carried to the last step. While most U.S.-based companies trumpet their support of semiconductor standards, they do not support the U.S. in the IEC activities. Although JEDEC membership is over 300 companies, we are only supporting international standardization at about a 1 percent level. We have a national problem that needs resolution. We must do better. It's understandable that the smaller countries are unable to support more than one IEC delegate, but not a major player in the semiconductor market like the U.S. The choice is ours. Is the U.S. going to be the driver or be driven in the international packaging standards arena?
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