Demonstration of Novel Adhesive Technology Enabling Low-Temperature Polymeric Bonding for Use in Microelectronics Applications

As more exotic materials are being used in Electronics devices, there are often tradeoffs to be made on the assembly process in order to utilize such components. One common constraint is the temperature sensitivity of some of these materials, such as the potential thermal degradation for certain newer exotic substrates or the inability of some biologically-active species to tolerate elevated temperatures. This can impact the assembly process by not being able to operate at temperatures high enough to utilize the standard polymeric and interconnect materials traditionally used in assembly operations. The need for new types of lower temperature adhesive chemistries is becoming more frequently requested where these applications utilizing biomedical technology, MEMS, and mainstream microelectronics packaging are converging. This paper focuses on development of an enabling technology that is able to provide durable bonding using lower temperature cure profiles than traditionally used for microelectronics assembly processes. The development of this technology is explained from a chemistry stand-point as well as application details. Extensive characterization, including a full battery of adhesion testing, is highlighted to demonstrate comparable performance of this new adhesive technology to traditional polymeric-based adhesives used for high-reliability applications. Additionally, testing was conducted using actual customer components and assembly parameters to provide realistic conditions and to ensure the results could scale to the high volume manufacturing processes.