Thinning and Singulation of Silicon: Root Causes of the Damage in Thin Chips

Kröninger, W.; Mariani, Fábio

doi:10.1109/ectc.2006.1645825

Cited by 29 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…Recently, an improved 4PB application has been developed by combining with the indentation test; nevertheless, this does not simplify the application of the 4PB test [18,19]. Even though higher strength is estimated with the ball or ring related tests from the recent trend of literatures, it is suggested that those ball on ring (BoR), ring on ring (RoR) and ball breaker (BB) tests are only good in evaluating the silicon surface related strength, either without influence from the assembly process or with an intended focus on the potential treatment improvement on the silicon surface [12,[15][16][17][20][21][22][23][24]. The critical impact, such as edge flaw or chipping, is excluded due to the nature of the test setup.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental evaluation on the silicon mechanical performance of electronic packaging

Fong¹,

Koay²,

Azid³

2017

J. MECH. ENG. SCI.

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Semiconductor packaging is trending towards a miniaturisation in size but an increase in functionality. Hence, the thickness of the silicon wafer has decreased dramatically with a concern on the possible degradation of the strength of the thinned wafer. In this paper, 3-point bend (3PB) on bare silicon is selected as the preferred silicon break strength (SBS) test methodology due to its setup effectiveness and subsequent application in the prediction study. This experimental testing study focused on evaluating the SBS from different thickness ranges. The study was then followed by evaluating the influence of a possible impact from flaw creation with laser marking on silicon surfaces. The results show that the SBS is consistent although with significant differences in the silicon thickness ranges. It is also revealed that the onset breaking load may not be a suitable metric and could be over sensitive on gauging the SBS comparison. The flaw creation from the engraving process revealed a significant drop of 75% SBS although with an approximate depth removal of <10% from the total thickness. The consistence failure mode is clearly visible and this left the silicon very vulnerable to catastrophic failure. This indicates that extra care is needed on ultra-thin silicon during the assembly process as fractures may happen even before any reliability stress test is conducted. Furthermore, the completion of the package level 3PB failure mode verification has helped to demonstrate that an SBS study can be conducted with a simplified bare silicon level testing. In short, the study with this simplified 3PB has successfully proven its usefulness in SBS estimation. The observed ultra-thin silicon SBS has degraded and strongly depended on the critical flaws especially from the surface defect and impact from the assembly handling.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental evaluation on the silicon mechanical performance of electronic packaging

Fong¹,

Koay²,

Azid³

2017

J. MECH. ENG. SCI.

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“…Problems that arise from use of a mechanical grinding technique include chipping and cracking on the top and bottom edges of the substrate near the sawn grooves (Kroninger 2006). To lower the amount of damage done to the wafer, diamond tipped saws usually traverse the material at a very slow rate (10 to 15 mm/s) (Cooke 2006).…”

Section: Current Separation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These components are front-side chipping, back side chipping, and side wall damage (Kroninger 2006). This is the exposed wall from the throat of the notch after separation from three-point bending.…”

Section: Current Separation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thin wafers are desirable for electronics and MEMS due to their increased thermal dissipation characteristics, mechanical flexibility, and lower silicon usage. However, thinner wafers are also more prone to failure due to their fragility (Kroninger 2006 Silicon based device manufacturing is one of the world"s most technologically advanced businesses. To remain economical, manufacturing of silicon-based electrical and MEMS devices demands mass production, meaning a larger number of die must be fabricated on a larger diameter wafers.…”

Section: Overview Of Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A Weibull function allows for skewing of the statistical function instead of forcing symmetry distribution as in a normal distribution. In silicon fracture studies, the Weibull is used most often [Greek 1996, Bohm 2004, Schoenfelder 2006, Tsuchiya 1998, Kroninger 2006 To assess how well the distribution fits the data, the correlation coefficient is defined as (Eq 3-14, Weibull.com 2009) where is the average of the x column and is the average of the y column.…”

Section: The Weibull Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Die separation strength for deep reactive ion etched wafers.

Porter¹

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Excessive forces, vibrations, and surface contact involved with these methods can cause undesirable side-wall chipping and microcracking, which often translates to inoperable devices.Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE) offers an alternative technique for die separation with less mechanical force. The DRIE process may be used to either introduce notches in one uniform step that allow for die separation via fracture in three-point bending, or to directly separate the dies by etching completely through the substrate.This work presents an analysis of the stress concentrations due to DRIE etched notches and the bending stress required to achieve die separation. The defect rate and die strength associated with DRIE-based die separated is compared with traditional saw methods for a variety of notch depths. Results indicate that the DRIE-based separation technique offers modest advantages over the traditional methods, but can also greatly reduce strength if the protective mask is over etched. It will also show that shallow trenches formed by a mechanical dicing saw resulted in stronger die than deeper trenches.vi

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Microwave Passive Components in Thin Film Technology

Rejaei

2010

Ultra-Thin Chip Technology and Applications

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Thinning and Singulation of Silicon: Root Causes of the Damage in Thin Chips

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

Experimental evaluation on the silicon mechanical performance of electronic packaging

Experimental evaluation on the silicon mechanical performance of electronic packaging

Die separation strength for deep reactive ion etched wafers.

Microwave Passive Components in Thin Film Technology

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