An assembly hall in Sherman, Texas, an automatic wire-bonding workstation in tan, brown and ochre, a desk-high steel frame 120 centimetres wide, at its left a closed cabinet with a front of plain smooth tan metal with rows of small toggle switches and square amber lamps, on the pale desk top a small monitor showing a single thin green crosshair, at the right a bonding head under a stereo microscope with two eyepieces, a woman in a pale blue nylon smock with her hair pinned up seen from behind, both hands on two small joysticks, behind her a row of manual bonding benches with women bent over microscopes, fluorescent tubes above.
What it was used for
Texas Instruments built the ABACUS II automatic wire bonder for its own plants: the ASME brochure, produced by the company archive, records that management directed that the machines be built in quantity and distributed to TI's assembly plants worldwide. The task was thermocompression bonding with gold wire on lead frames for 14- and 16-pin packages, fed in magazines of 20 lead frame strips; each strip was later cut into 10 finished circuits. It was not operator-free: the chip was not located accurately enough for the mechanism to hit the 0.005 inch bonding pad, so the operator had to position it finely with 2 joysticks through a 30-power binocular and then press start. The first sites, in early 1973, were Japan and Taiwan.
What was new
What was new was not the automation but its price. The ASME brochure writes that the earlier ABACUS family showed good improvements in quality and throughput but was expensive to build at 65,000 dollars each and not as reliable as anticipated; the project goal was to cut the manufacturing cost to 15,000 dollars, and the first run of 100 machines came to 15,164 dollars each. The controller contributed to that: the TI960A was announced in November 1971 with 4096 words of MOS memory at 2,850 dollars, where the older TI960 with core memory sold for more than 8,000 dollars in 1970. Predecessors in the same house were ABACUS, ABACUS A and ABACUS B, 58 machines in all. The ASME plaque claims priority only with a qualifier: the first practical, automated production machine for the assembly of integrated circuits. The barb: this prototype ran 13 years in production, from Texas via Taiwan to Brazil, and bonded, by the ASME's estimate, more than 50 million circuits.
What the sources leave open: Almost all figures come from one publication, the ASME brochure produced by the Texas Instruments archive 20 years after the event. The IEEE wiki ETHW writes that ABACUS II was on the market by 1972; the brochure does not carry that. On 13 March 1972 Electronics describes a still-secret TI bonder of German design - whether that is ABACUS II cannot be decided. The machine had no image processing, and no yield figure is documented.