Today's trend to more compact and slimmer profiles in portable PCs, cellular phones, and other information processing and communications equipment is increasing demand for semiconductor devices housed in a very thin LSI package. Such packaging must also be resilient to physical shock and exposure to humidity.

In order to meet these requirements, Toshiba and ANAM Industrial have agreed to work together in quad-flat packaging (QFP), a standard package widely used for application specific ICs (ASICs) and microprocessors.

The companies will jointly develop large sized QFP packages with thicknesses of 1.0 and 1.4 milimeters and 200 to 300 pins. They will also develop a special type of QFP package, Power Quad 2 (PQ2), that offers an improved heat dissipation structure required to accomodate high-speed VLSI chips that consume more power than standard devices. The companies aim to secure JEDEC level 1 standard, the industry's highest certification for resistance to humidity, for both packages.

Basic development is expected to be completed by 1997, and the companies will then apply the technologies to their assembly of semiconductor products.