Kulicke & Soffa Industries
Kulicke and Soffa Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:KLIC) was set up in 1951 and is now based in Singapore. Kulicke & Soffa focus on capital equipment and expendable tools to assemble semiconductor devices, including integrated circuits, discrete devices, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and power modules. The company operates Equipment segment and Expendable Tools segment.
History
Kulicke & Soffa was founded in 1951 and incorporated in 1956.
- 1972 Micro Swiss joined K&S
- 1981 Kulicke & Soffa was listed on NASDAQ (KLIC)
- 1996 Semitec joined Kulicke & Soffa and establish Flip Chip Technologies
- 2000 Kulicke & Soffa acquired Cerprobe and Probe Tech to form the K&S Test Division.
- 2004 Kulicke & Soffa sold flip chip business to FlipChip International, LLC
- 2006 Kulicke & Soffa sold wafer test business to SV Probe and package test business to Investcorp.
- 2007 Kulicke & Soffa acquired Alphasem from Dover Technologies International, Inc.
- 2008 Kulicke & Soffa sold off Wire Business to W.C. Heraeus GmbH
- 2008 Kulicke & Soffa acquired Orthodyne Electronics Corporation
Products
- Equipment segment
- The main products of this segment are ball bonders (connecting wires between the bond pads of the semiconductor and the leads on its package), heavy wire wedge bonders, wafer level bonders (applying bumps to die for some variants of the flip chip assembly process), manual wire bonders, and die bonders (stacked die applications).
- Expendable tools
- The main products of this segment provides capillaries (used in ball bonders), bonding wedges (used in heavy wire wedge bonders), and dicing blades (used to cut silicon wafers into individual semiconductors).
Research and development
- 1972 Developed its first automatic wire bonder - K&S Model 1412.
- 2000 Introduced world's fastest, finest pitch wire bonders (8028s, 8028pps)
- 2008 Launches the Power Series, a new generation of semiconductor assembly equipment.
- 2005 Implemented Cordys' Business Collaboration Platform (BCP) as its core technology platform, which enabled it to quickly integrate and deploy new enterprise-level business process capabilities linked by a single web services-based portal.
STOCK
K&S is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq stock exchange traded under ticker symbol KLIC.
On April 22, 2014, shares in K&S surged 10 percent on news that Lemelson Capital Management, a private investment management firm overseen by Emmanuel Lemelson, was building an equity stake in the company and published an open letter to K&S's CEO urging it to launch a share repurchase plan. Four months later, on August 27, 2014, Kulicke & Soffa heeded Lemelson's share repurchase recommendation, announcing that its Board of Directors had authorized a share purchase of up to $100 million.
Awards
- The K&S IConn High Performance Ball Bonder won the 2008 Advanced Packaging Award in the category of Best New Product in Wire Bonding Equipment and Materials
- The K&S Maxµm Ultra High Performance Ball Bonder won the 2006 Advanced Packaging Award in the category of Best New Product in Wire Bonding Equipment and Materials.
- K&S Maxum Ultra Ball Bonder earns Best Product Award in 2006.
- K&S Maxµmplus Ultra High Speed Ball Bonder won the 2004 Advanced Packaging Award in the category of Wire Bonding Equipment.
- K&S was awarded 2002 Electronic Manufacturing Technology by the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society.