Dr. Farhad Farassat, President and CEO, F&K Delvotec Bondtechnik

Having emerged from a year which made even the abysmal period after 2000 look good by comparison, everybody in the industry is understandably cautious for the coming year.

One of the trends we see firming up is the continued rise of power electronics. Regulating power instead of just switching it on or off is still attractive in a huge number of industrial, consumer and automotive applications.

With the added appeal that energy savings will translate into cost savings ever larger the more the economy recovers, simply because with the recovery energy will become more expensive again.

An extra push in this area comes from solar and wind energy which need sophisticated controllers to deliver constant output voltage.

At F&K Delvotec, our response to this market need has been to intensify development of wire bonders suitable for all kinds of power devices.

Using the field-proven fifth-generation bond heads, we have introduced a double-headed machine on a single base which reduces both cost and footprint further, while increasing bonding speed without any loss of bonding quality. 

The benefit to the user is increased productivity at lower cost which is precisely what markets especially in the Far East are demanding for their high-volume products. So far, our order book proves us right - and we are robustly optimistic for 2010.