Frank Niklaus

Adhesive wafer bonding

Wafer bonding with intermediate polymer adhesives is an important fabrication technique for advanced microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems, such as three-dimensional integrated circuits, advanced packaging, and microfluidics. In adhesive wafer bonding, the polymer adhesive bears the forces involved to hold the surfaces together. The main advantages of adhesive wafer bonding include the insensitivity to surface topography, the low bonding temperatures, the compatibility with standard integrated circuit wafer processing, and the ability to join different types of wafers. Compared to alternative wafer bonding techniques, adhesive wafer bonding is simple, robust, and low cost. This article reviews the state-of-the-art polymer adhesive wafer bonding technologies, materials, and applications.

Low-temperature full wafer adhesive bonding

We have systematically investigated the influence of different bonding parameters on void formation in a low-temperature adhesive bonding process. As a result of these studies we present guidelines ...

MEMS-Based Uncooled Infrared Bolometer Arrays : A Review

Uncooled infrared bolometer arrays have become the technology of choice for low-cost infrared imaging systems used in applications such as thermography, firefighting, driver night vision, security and surveillance. Uncooled infrared bolometer arrays are reaching performance levels which previously only were possible with cooled infrared photon detectors. With a continuously increasing market volume (> 100 000 units per year to date), the cost for uncooled infrared imaging chips are decreasing accordingly. In this paper we give an overview of the historical development of uncooled infrared bolometer technology and present the most important bolometer performance parameters. The different technology concepts, bolometer design approaches and bolometer materials (including vanadium oxide, amorphous silicon, silicon diodes, silicon-germanium and metals) are discussed in detail. This is followed by an analysis of the current state-of-the-art infrared bolometer technologies, the status of the infrared industry and the latest technology trends.

Electromechanical Piezoresistive Sensing in Suspended Graphene Membranes

Monolayer graphene exhibits exceptional electronic and mechanical properties, making it a very promising material for nanoelectromechanical devices. Here, we conclusively demonstrate the piezoresistive effect in graphene in a nanoelectromechanical membrane configuration that provides direct electrical readout of pressure to strain transduction. This makes it highly relevant for an important class of nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) transducers. This demonstration is consistent with our simulations and previously reported gauge factors and simulation values. The membrane in our experiment acts as a strain gauge independent of crystallographic orientation and allows for aggressive size scalability. When compared with conventional pressure sensors, the sensors have orders of magnitude higher sensitivity per unit area.

Wafer-Level Heterogeneous Integration for MOEMS, MEMS, and NEMS

Wafer-level heterogeneous integration technologies for microoptoelectromechanical systems (MOEMS), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) enable the combination of dissimilar classes of materials and components into single systems. Thus, high-performance materials and subsystems can be combined in ways that would otherwise not be possible, and thereby forming complex and highly integrated micro- or nanosystems. Examples include the integration of high-performance optical, electrical or mechanical materials such as monocrystalline silicon, graphene or III-V materials with integrated electronic circuits. In this paper the state-of-the-art of wafer-level heterogeneous integration technologies suitable for MOEMS, MEMS, and NEMS devices are reviewed. Various heterogeneous MOEMS, MEMS, and NEMS devices that have been described in literature are presented.

Low temperature full wafer adhesive bonding of structured wafers

In this paper, we present a technology for void free low temperature full wafer adhesive bonding of structured wafers. Benzocyclobutene (BCB) is used as the intermediate bonding material. BCB bonds well with various materials and does not release significant amounts of byproducts during the curing process. Thus void-free bond interfaces can be achieved. Cured BCB coatings have an excellent resistance to a variety of acids, alkalines and solvents and a high transparency for light across the visible spectrum, which makes it a good material for fluidic, optical and packaging applications. We demonstrate the fabrication of fluidic structures and the embedding of protruding surface structures. An important finding is that the pre-cured BCB coatings are extremely deformable and have a liquid-like behaviour during bonding.

Hydrophobic valves of plasma deposited octafluorocyclobutane in DRIE channels

The suitability of using octafluorocyclobutane (C4F8) patches as hydrophobic valves in microfluidic biochemical applications has been shown. A technique has been developed to generate lithographica ...

Unconventional applications of wire bonding create opportunities for microsystem integration

Automatic wire bonding is a highly mature, cost-efficient and broadly available back-endprocess, intended to create electrical interconnections in semiconductor chip packaging. Modern production wi ...

Low-temperature wafer-level transfer bonding

In this paper, we present a new wafer-level transfer bonding technology. The technology can be used to transfer devices or films from one substrate wafer (sacrificial device wafer) to another substrate wafer (target wafer). The transfer bonding technology includes only low-temperature processes; thus, it is compatible with integrated circuits. The process flow consists of low-temperature adhesive bonding followed by sacrificially thinning of the device wafer. The transferred devices/films can be electrically interconnected to the target wafer (e.g., a CMOS wafer) if required. We present three example devices for which we have used the transfer bonding technology. The examples include two polycrystalline silicon structures and a test device for temperature coefficient of resistance measurements of thin-film materials. One of the main advantages of the new transfer bonding technology is that transducers and integrated circuits can be independently processed and optimized on different wafers before integrating the transducers on the integrated circuit wafer. Thus, the transducers can be made of, e.g., monocrystalline silicon or other high-temperature annealed, high-performance materials. Wafer-level transfer bonding can be a competitive alternative to flip-chip bonding, especially for thin-film devices with small feature sizes and when small electrical interconnections (<3/spl times/3 /spl mu/m/sup 2/) between the devices and the target wafer are required.

Arrays of monocrystalline silicon micromirrors fabricated using CMOS compatible transfer bonding

In this paper, we present CMOS compatible fabrication of monocrystalline silicon micromirror arrays using membrane transfer bonding. To fabricate the micromirrors, a thin monocrystalline silicon device layer is transferred from a standard silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer to a target wafer (e.g. a CMOS wafer) using low temperature adhesive wafer bonding. In this way, very flat, uniform and low stress micromirror membranes made of monocrystalline silicon can be directly fabricated on top of CMOS circuits. The mirror fabrication does not contain any bond alignment between the wafers; thus, the mirror dimensions and alignment accuracies are only limited by the photolithographic steps. Micromirror arrays with 4/spl times/4 pixels and a pitch size of 16 /spl mu/m /spl times/16 /spl mu/m have been fabricated.