Flex circuit depaneling in thin film polymer using dry etching technology

In support of improved performance and panel throughput, new work is presented on the development of a plasma-based process for flexible substrate depaneling. The technique complements the standard laser skiving procedure that makes use of a pulse overlap to create line-shaped geometries. For high-density packaging application, fine line cutting with arbitrary contour shaping is required. In this study, cut width of approximately 15 μm in a 20 μm polymer film was achieved by using plasma etching. With properly laser debonding process, the flexible substrate can be separated from a rigid carrier. The dry etching process is presented in this article along with a comparison to laser-based approaches.