14 DAY TRIAL // Following the news about Nvidia's mobility chips being faulty, ATI, the graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, has released a statement assuring its partners that the ATI Mobility Radeon graphics cards do not experience issues with packaging, as the competing GPUs do. The company also revealed possible reasons that allowed the mobile GeForce graphics chips to be affected.
"In the past couple of weeks there has been considerable media attention regarding product reliability of certain notebook GPU die/packaging material failures. AMD is pleased to reassure our customers that our ATI Mobility Radeon GPUs are not experiencing any such abnormal field failures," X-bit labs claim to have read in the AMD statement.
ATI sustains that, a few years ago, when the RoHS compliancy became compulsory, the company started using eutectic solder bumping (required to attach the ASIC die to the substrate) for its ASIC packaging process, instead of the restricted solder bumping material. The "eutectic" or "eutectic mixture" is a compound of materials of a certain proportion that allows it to have a melting point as low as possible. Also, all the ingredients of the mixture simultaneously crystallize from melt liquid at low temperature. ATI says that it chose to use this mixture instead of the alternative high-lead bumps which are also allowable by RoHS. According to the statement, the bumps were known as being more fragile and also suspected to fail on the field if not implemented properly.
After beginning the use of the eutectic bumping material, ATI focused on ensuring that the device was reliable, so the company developed and implemented a specialized power redistribution layer (RDL).
"Package reliability is a matter of overall design and implementation. Factors such as the power distribution in the design of the ASIC, bumping process, bumping material and the techniques used to adhere bumps to the wafer all play an important role in the reliability of the packaged part. We would welcome the opportunity to review our packaging and quality processes with you if further information is required," AMD claims in the statement.
Nvidia has never officially commented on the materials used for attaching the chips to the substrate, but all points to the idea that, in the past, the company utilized certain substances which were less reliable than the eutectic mixtures AMD's ATI uses in conjunction with RDL.
No comment on the news-story has been issued by Nvidia yet.