Adhesive Wafer Bonding for Microelectronic and Microelectromechanical Systems (2002)

Semiconductor wafer bonding has been a subject of interestfor many years and a wide variety of wafer bonding techniqueshave been reported in literature. In adhesive wafer bondingorganic and inorganic adhesives are used as intermediatebonding material. The main advantages of adhesive wafer bondingare the relatively low bonding temperatures, the lack of needfor an electric voltage or current, the compatibility withstandard CMOS wafers and the ability to join practically anykind of wafer materials. Adhesive wafer bonding requires nospecial wafer surface treatmentssuch as planarisation.Structures and particles at the wafer surfaces can be toleratedand compensated for some extent by the adhesive material.Adhesive wafer bonding is a comparably simple, robust andlowcost bonding process. In this thesis, adhesive wafer bondingtechniques with different polymer adhesives have beendeveloped. The relevant bonding parameters needed to achievehigh quality and high yield wafer bonds have been investigated.A selective adhesive wafer bonding process has also beendeveloped that allows localised bonding on lithographicallydefined wafer areas. Adhesive wafer bonding has been utilised in variousapplication areas. A novel CMOS compatible film, device andmembrane transfer bonding technique has been developed. Thistechnique allows the integration of standard CMOS circuits withthin film transducers that can consist of practically any typeof crystalline or noncrystalline high performance material(e.g. monocrystalline silicon, gallium arsenide,indium-phosphide, etc.). The transferred transducers or filmscan be thinner than 0.3 µm. The feature sizes of thetransferred transducers can be below 1.5 µm and theelectrical via contacts between the transducers and the newsubstrate wafer can be as small as 3x3 µm2. Teststructures for temperature coefficient of resistancemeasurements of semiconductor materials have been fabricatedusing device transfer bonding. Arrays of polycrystallinesilicon bolometers for use in uncooled infrared focal planearrays have been fabricated using membrane transfer bonding.The bolometers consist of free-hanging membrane structures thatare thermally isolated from the substrate wafer. Thepolycrystalline silicon bolometers are fabricated on asacrificial substrate wafer. Subsequently, they are transferredand integrated on a new substrate wafer using membrane transferbonding. With the same membrane transfer bonding technique,arrays of torsional monocrystalline silicon micromirrors havebeen fabricated. The mirrors have a size of 16x16 µm2 anda thickness of 0.34 µm. The advantages of micromirrorsmade of monocrystalline silicon are their flatness, uniformityand mechanical stability. Selective adhesive wafer bonding hasbeen used to fabricate very shallow cavities that can beutilised in packaging and component protection applications. Anew concept is proposed that allows hermetic sealing ofcavities fabricated using adhesive wafer bonding. Furthermore,microfluidic devices, channels and passive valves for use inmicro total analysis systems are presented. Adhesive wafer bonding is a generic CMOS compatible bondingtechnique that can be used for fabrication and integration ofvarious microsystems such as infrared focal plane arrays,spatial light modulators, microoptical systems, laser systems,MEMS, RF-MEMS and stacking of active electronic films forthree-dimensional high-density integration of electroniccircuits. Adhesive wafer bonding can also be used forfabrication of microcavities in packaging applications, forwafer-level stacking of integrated circuit chips (e.g. memorychips) and for fabrication of microfluidic systems.