Application of Au-Sn eutectic bonding in hermetic radio-frequency microelectromechanical system wafer level packaging

Abstract

Development of packaging is one of the critical issues toward realizing commercialization of radio-frequency-microelectromechanical system (RF-MEMS) devices. The RF-MEMS package should be designed to have small size, hermetic protection, good RF performance, and high reliability. In addition, packaging should be conducted at sufficiently low temperature. In this paper, a low-temperature hermetic wafer level packaging scheme for the RF-MEMS devices is presented. For hermetic sealing, Au-Sn eutectic bonding technology at temperatures below 300°C is used. Au-Sn multilayer metallization with a square loop of 70 µm in width is performed. The electrical feed-through is achieved by the vertical through-hole via filling with electroplated Cu. The size of the MEMS package is 1 mm × 1 mm × 700 µm. The shear strength and hermeticity of the package satisfies the requirements of MIL-STD-883F. Any organic gases or contamination are not observed inside the package. The total insertion loss for the packaging is 0.075 dB at 2 GHz. Furthermore, the robustness of the package is demonstrated by observing no performance degradation and physical damage of the package after several reliability tests.