Topic summary
Wire bond

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Wire bonding.
Wire bond manufacturing
Much work has been done to characterize various metal systems, review critical manufacturing parameters, and identify typical reliability issues that occur in wire bonding. When it comes to material selection, the application and use environment will dictate the metal system. Often the electrical properties, mechanical properties, and cost are taken into account when making a decision. For example, a high current device for a space application might require a large diameter aluminium wire bond in a hermetically sealed ceramic package. If cost is a large constraint, then avoiding gold wire bonds may be a necessity. Some recent work has been done to look at copper wire bonds in automotive applications. This is only a small sampling, as there is a vast body of work reviewing and testing what material systems work best in different applications.