Semiconductor History | Mitsui High-tec Komine — Stamping the Frame Around the Chip
· 1969-6
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Semiconductor History | Mitsui High-tec Komine — Stamping the Frame Around the Chip
kevin
In June 1969, Mitsui High-tec began mass production and sale of stamped IC leadframes using tungsten-carbide progressive dies. A national industrial-technology record dates the preserved die to 1969 and credits the approach with cutting the cost of the older photo-etching route to roughly one tenth.
A leadframe is the metal skeleton around many packaged chips. Its inner leads connect to the die by tiny wires, its outer leads connect the package to a circuit board, and its shape must remain consistent through plating, bonding, molding, trimming, and forming.
The good side of stamping was speed. A progressive die performs several operations as a metal strip advances through the press, allowing large numbers of nearly identical frames to emerge from a process built for repetition.
Tungsten carbide mattered because the features were small and the production runs long. The tool had to resist wear while holding tight dimensions; a die company that could grind and maintain such tooling could turn packaging hardware from a costly specialty into a mass-produced component.
That change helped semiconductor assembly scale. Cheap, repeatable leadframes supported the spread of plastic IC packages through calculators, appliances, automobiles, and industrial controls, even though the metal frame remained largely invisible beneath black molding compound.
The bad side sits in the mechanics. Stamping can create burrs, residual stress, dimensional drift, and tool wear, and every improvement in lead pitch makes die alignment and maintenance harder; one damaged station can repeat the same defect across a large lot.
The success also created exposure. Leadframes became price-sensitive, assembly moved across borders, package formats changed, and later products such as ball-grid arrays and advanced substrates reduced the frame’s role in parts of the market.
Komine is more than a symbolic headquarters pin: Mitsui built its Komine plant here in 1960, before the leadframe breakthrough. The current building is later, but the site preserves the geographic continuity between the company’s toolmaking roots and its semiconductor business.
Sources: [Mitsui High-tec company history](https://mitsui-high-tec.eu/company-history/); [National Museum of Nature and Science record for the 1969 die](https://sts.kahaku.go.jp/sts/detail.php?c=&city=&id=&no=116012130002&org=&p=1185&pref=&word=&y1=&y2=); [Mitsui High-tec Japanese history](https://www.mitsui-high-tec.com/about/history/); [official headquarters profile](https://www.mitsui-high-tec.com/company/about/).
Photo: RGloucester, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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