Influence of polyimide on thermal stress evolution in polyimide/Cu
thick film composite
Heng Li
1,2
•
Gong Cheng
1,2
•
Gaowei Xu
1
•
Le Luo
1
Received: 27 February 2016 / Accepted: 15 April 2016 / Published online: 29 April 2016
Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Polyimide(PI)/Cu composite thick films are
widely used in wafer level packaging (WLP), and a com-
mon problem is the defects such as void, delaminati on,
crack or wafer warpage induced by thermal stress. Com-
pared with traditional rigid substrate/Cu/passivation sys-
tem, PI imposes quite a different boundary constraint on
Cu, resulting in a special stress evolution, and the corre-
sponding mechanism is far from fully understood. Five sets
of composites are constructed to investigate the influence
of PI on thermal stress evolution in Cu film by means of
in situ wafer warpage mea surement under thermal cycling.
Together with finite element analyses, it’s counterintuitive
to find that although PI indeed reduces the stress in Cu, it
exacerbates overall wafer warpage at room temperature.
Warpage evolution reveals that composites consisting of
substrate/PI/Cu sustains a moderate compressive stress
while bare PI film is totally stress relaxed at high temper-
ature, indicating that Cu and PI restrains stress relaxation
reciprocally. It suggests that mutual effect should be con-
sidered when evaluating the stress distribution in polymer-
metal composite thick films.
1 Introduction
Polymer/metal composite thick films are widely used in
wafer level packaging (WLP). A common problem of
such composites is the thermal stress when undergo
packaging process in which the induced undesirable
thermal str esse s a nd correspond ing micros tr uctu r e evo-
lution might cause v oid, hillock, crack or interfacial
delamination in layered structures [1, 2]. Moreover, large
wafer warpage originated from Cu and PI deformation
poses a threat to handling of t he wafer and affects the
quality of sequential process steps such a s lithography [3–
5]. Stress evolution of Cu films due to coble creep, power-
law creep, dislocation glide/climb, or grain growth has
been analyzed [6–17 ], and transient behavior and Bau-
schinger-like Eff ect also draw the attention of industry
people [ 12, 18].
The polymer has large influence on stress relaxation of
metals within composites due to sophisticated reaction
during curing process and thermal cycling [19–28]. Vari-
ous polymers, including polyimide resin, cyanate ester
resin, bismaleimide resin, benzoxazine resin and so on,
have been widely studied [29–33]. Typically, polyimide
(PI) is widely used in semiconductor industry for passi-
vation or dielectric layer. Due to dramatic elution of ther-
mal mechanical properties during curing process, large
stress may arise in the composites. Figure 1 depicts some
typical thermal stress induced defects in a 2P1 M (two PI
layers with one metal layer embedded) composite from our
research project, which is commonly used in redistribution
layer (RDL) in WLP. The defects include PI crevices
within one PI layer caused by intrinsic stress, delamination
at PI/Cu interface cause d by coefficient of thermal expan-
sion (CTE) mismatch,and cracks at the interface of two PI
layers caused by shrinkage.
& Le Luo
leluo@mail.sim.ac.cn
1
State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai
Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai 200050,
China
2
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049,
China
123
J Mater Sci: Mater Electron (2016) 27:8325–8331
DOI 10.1007/s10854-016-4841-6