Temporary and permanent bonding enables 3D integration of ultrathin wafers

Abstract

Rising demand in memory is just one example how 3D integration is still gaining momentum. Not only the form factor but also performance is improved for several 3D integration applications by reducing the wafer thickness. Two competing process flows using thin wafers are to carry out for 3D integration today. Firstly, two wafers can be bonded face-to-face with subsequent thinning without the need to handle a thin wafer. However, some chip designs require a face-to-back stacking of thin wafers, where temporary bonding becomes an inevitable process step. In this case, the challenge of the temporary bonding process is different to traditional stacking on chip level, where usually the wafers are diced after debonding and then stacked on chip level, which means die thicknesses are typically in the range of 50 μm. The goal of wafer level transfer is a massive reduction of the wafer thickness. Therefore temporary and permanent bonding has to be combined to enable stacking on wafer level with very thin wafers. The first step is temporary bonding of the device wafer with the temporary carrier through an adhesive interlayer, followed by thinning and other backside processes. Afterwards the thinned wafer is permanently bonded to the target wafer before debonding from the carrier wafer. This can be repeated several times to be suitable for example a high bandwidth memory, where several layers of DRAM are stacked on top of each other. Another application is the memory integration on processors, or die segmentation processes. The temporary bonding process flow has to be very well controlled in terms of total thickness variations (TTV) of the intermediate adhesive between device and carrier wafer. The requirements for the temporary bonding adhesive include offering sufficient adhesion between device and carrier wafer for the subsequent processes. The choice of the material class for this study is the Brewer Science dual layer material comprising of a curable layer which offers high mechanical stability to enable low TTV during the thinning process and a release layer for mechanical debond process. The release layer must lead to a successful debond but prevent spontaneous debonding during grinding and other processes. Total thickness variation values of the adhesive will be analyzed in dependence of the adhesive layer thickness as this is a key criterion for a successful implementation at the manufactures. Besides the TTV the mechanical stability during grinding will be evaluated by CSAM to make sure no delamination has happened. For feasibility of the total process flow it is important that the mechanical debonding requires less force compared to the separation of the permanent bonded wafers. Other process parameters such as edge trimming of the device wafer as well as edge removal of the mechanical debond release layer are investigated.