Current Issue The International Reference for Chip-Scale Electronics, Flip-Chip Technology, Optoelectronic Interconnection and Wafer-Level Packaging August - September 2002 Email the editor

Ron Iscoff Editor

In the course of gathering (and verifying) material for Chip Scale Review, I visit a lot of web sites every month. One thing has become painfully clear: Many companies pay little or no attention to content once they've opened shop on the Web.

This is as good a time as any to paraphrase one of America's greatest generals, Douglas MacArthur, who opined that "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." Let me suggest that old web sites, too, never die, they just go on and on and on, ad nauseum.

A Time for Reflection

For those companies that feel they should abandon the print media in favor of the Web, it might be time to reflect about a few matters. First of all, are you ready to invest in your web site? That means an investment of both time and money. If you don't keep your web site up-to-date, you're doing yourself more harm than good.

Amkor's web site is graphically appealing with solid content.	STATS' website scores right along with the best.

Of the 50 to 100 web sites in the semiconductor packaging equipment and services universe that I visit weekly, the majority are woefully out-of-date in keeping site visitors informed.

Someday, I may create a scientific study, but I can assure you that 10-20 percent are months-and sometimes years-behind in posting news and new products! But I'm probably not telling you anything that you don't already know.

Foreign-Made Web Sites

Now, let's look at foreign-made web sites. English, for better or for worse, is the lingua franca of international business. Yet, the majority of foreign-based sites-especially packaging foundries and equipment companies based in Asia-appear at least silly, if not inept, because of the way they mangle the English language.

Certainly we're not expecting Asian marketing people to be facile with written English, but knowing that they're not, at the least they should convince their U.S.-based colleagues to read over their web content. The common English gaffes would be obvious to most native English speakers.

Now that I've stirred up a hornet's nest, let me give you my top packaging foundry sites. My ratings are generally based on the home page design and what it promises for the rest of the site. For this strictly biased look, I've only considered $200 million+ companies.

Amkor [amkor.com] tops the list. Amkor is the industry leader, so it makes sense that it should invest the most resources in its web site. It's obvious that considerable time and attention have been given to amkor.com. It's comprehensive, up-to-date and makes for easy reading. Just about anything you'd want or need to know about Amkor is here. My grade: A.

CS2, Belgium, is no more, and neither is their appealing website.	ChipPAC's home page is clean and precise.

Second place honors are shared by Santa Clara's ChipPAC [chippac.com] and Singapore's STATS [stts.com]. ChipPAC was once the assembly and test division of Hyundai, but is now separate. Friendly home page, clean graphics, easy on the eyes and appears up-to-date. However, ChipPAC needs to start using a spell checker and a grammar checker, both mechanical and human varieties, to eliminate typos and mangled sentence construction. I spotted obvious problems with both.

STATS offers visitors a clean, appealing home page with large, bold, inviting graphics. When I last visited, the news was up-to-date as of the day of my visit. A couple of words stroll by in the opening animation, but quickly settle down. A- to ChipPAC and STATS.

Third place is a three-way tie between Taiwan-based ASE [aseglobal.com], OSE [ose.com.tw] and Siliconware Precision Industries Ltd. [spilca.com]. All are relatively clean, graphics-wise. I found ASE, however, a little heavy in drop-down graphics and OSE seemingly reluctant to use color on the home page. ASE also offers too many choices in terms of which ASE group you want info about and may be too comprehensive for a single web site. My grade: B+.

Here's another tie: this one is between Hong Kong's ASAT Ltd. [asat.com] and Malaysia's Carsem [carsem.com]. It pains me not to give these fine companies a higher rank, especially since I'll probably hear about it from my old friends at both companies.

ASAT has built an attractive site, but it's a bit too busy, and animated graphics on a home page tend to make me nervous. I offer similar comments for Carsem's site. The Carsem home page is too much of a good thing. It has the makings of a great site, but the graphics flying from left to right on the home page are distracting. My grade: B.

Ironically, one of the most attractive sites belonged to the now-bankrupt CS2. If the company were still viable, I would rank their site with the best-except for an ill-advised crawl of phone and fax numbers at the top.

I think we'll stop here. We're running out of space, and we're about to get into ratings that drop precipitously to "C" and below. If you didn't see your web site mentioned, don't fret, we'll try this again next year.