John Papagni, long time industry veteran with Technitron, and a specialist in Probe Card, ATE and Burn in Board technology, has joined the DDi team, underscoring a significant commitment by DDi into this specialty market.

Anaheim, CA: DDi, a leading provider of time-critical, technologically-advanced printed circuit board engineering and manufacturing services, has announced the addition of John Papagni to the DDi management team, as the Director of ATE and Burn In Board Technology.

For over 30 years, John has dedicated his efforts to providing design and manufacturing services in support of semiconductor testing; specifically Probe Cards, THB/HAST Boards, ATE/DUT Boards, and Burn-in Boards, all of which are critical to the reliability of an integrated circuit. John joined the DDI team in March of this year.

In regards to this important news, Mike Mathews, Senior Vice President of Operations for DDi says this has actually been coming for awhile. “For the past several years, we’ve been working with our customers to understand their demand and technology requirements in this market sector. We have been extending our capabilities into this market and yet, when the opportunity arose with John, we were able to move quickly to bring John and a few select personnel on-board, as well as certain specialized equipment assets. This has allowed us to go further into this technology space and provide tighter pitch products to our customers. John and his team have been helping us move down that technology path quicker.”

John adds, “What we brought to DDi were some critical custom equipment sets that are primarily used for the very tight pitch devices that the semiconductor people are manufacturing today – primarily 0.5mm, 0.4mm and 0.3mm devices, and some unique process experience for drilling and high aspect ratio plating.”

When asked how they viewed the market going forward, and what exactly this would mean for DDi moving into the next years, Mike reinforced that the benefits of this investment for DDi and their customers goes even deeper than their obvious commitment into this specialized market segment. Increasing DDi’s technical capabilities will enhance their offering in their other markets as well. “In this industry, we have always seen a drive to tighter requirements and geometries. The benefit for DDi’s customers is that we take the lessons learned and the techniques used to successfully build these advanced ATE products, and apply these best practices to our other DDi facilities. Tighter registration with smaller holes, higher aspect ratios and the ability to plate them reliably will apply to our more standard products as well. This will help us with our main stream high technology customers, as they move to increase density to drive cost out of their products and accommodate the higher density components coming today and in the future.“