Extended reliability of gold and copper ball bonds in microelectronic packaging

Abstract

Wire bonding is the predominant mode of interconnection in microelectronic packaging. Gold wire bonding has been refined again and again to retain control of interconnect technology due to its ease of workability and years of reliability data. Copper (Cu) wire bonding is well known for its advantages such as cost-effectiveness and better electrical conductivity in microelectronic packaging. However, extended reliabilities of Cu wire bonding are still unknown as of now. Extended reliabilities of Au and Pd-coated Cu (Cu) ball bonds are useful technical information for Au and Cu wire deployment in microelectronic packaging. This paper discusses the influence of wire type and mold compound effect on the package reliability and after several component reliability stress tests. Failure analysis has been conducted to identify its associated failure mechanisms after the package conditions for Au and Cu ball bonds. Extended reliabilities of both wire types are investigated after unbiased HAST (UHAST), temperature cycling (TC), and high-temperature storage life test (HTSL) at 150, 175, and 200 °C aging temperatures. Weibull plots have been plotted for each reliability stress. Obviously, Au ball bond is found with longer time to failure in unbiased HAST stress compared to Cu ball bonds for both mold compounds. Cu wire exhibits equivalent package and or better reliability margin compared to Au ball bonds in TC and HTSL tests. Failure mechanisms of UHAST and TC have been proposed, and its mean time to failure (t 50), characteristic life (t 63.2, η), and shape parameter (s) have been discussed in this paper. Feasibility of silver (Ag) wire bonding deployment in microelectronic packaging is discussed at the last section in this paper.