A study on factors influencing thermal-cycling-induced passivation damages in semiconductor devices assembled utilizing a multi-chip package technique
摘要
Three main factors responsible for passivation cracking on chip surfaces in multi-chip packages were investigated under thermal cycling conditions: modification of the pattern structure, thermal mismatch variation between packaging materials, and different thermal-cycling amplitudes. The present experimental results show that adopting a protective layer (i.e., polyimide) to prevent passivation cracking is effective for up to 800 thermal cycles. However, this work also shows that thermal mismatch-induced deformation of polyimide at the grooved region of a passivation layer can become more severe with thermal cycling, eventually resulting in passivation cracking after 1000 thermal cycles from −55 °C to 125 °C as well as from −65 °C to 150 °C. However, replacing the conventional single adhesive layer with an advanced adhesive-filling base layer effectively prevented passivation cracking, even after 1000 thermal cycles from −65 °C to 150 °C. Through the Cramer-von Mises criterion this study also presents how the replaced adhesive-filling base layer can minimize thermal mismatch-induced stress responsible for passivation cracking during temperature variation.