Effects of Thermocompression Bonding Parameters on Cu Pillar/Sn-Ag Microbump Solder Joint Morphology Using Nonconductive Films

In this paper, wafer-level preapplied nonconductive films (NCFs) were used to interconnect the Cu pillar/Sn-Ag microbumps for 3-D through silicon via vertical interconnection. Thermocompression bonding is a common method to interconnect chips to substrates using NCFs, and thermocompression bonding time should be reduced to increase the bonding productivity. Therefore, isothermal bonding method without heating and cooling process in bonding profile was introduced to reduce the bonding time. Solder joints bonded by an isothermal bonding method were compared to those joints bonded by a conventional ramp-up bonding method that was consist of heating, bonding, and cooling process. Final joint gap was decreased using an isothermal bonding method due to higher heating rate, and solder joint morphology was also changed according to the final solder joint gap. Furthermore, solder joint should have enough contact area to substrate metal pads without solder wetting on the Cu pillar sidewall to avoid reliability problems by Sn consumption at the solder joint. Effects of isothermal bonding parameters were investigated in terms of the bonding pressure, temperature, and time to optimize the isothermal bonding parameters for good solder joint. As bonding pressure and bonding temperature increased, solder joint gap decreased because final joint gap was determined by bonding pressures and dynamic viscosity of NCFs. Isothermal bonding times can be reduced to 10 s, because the degree-of-cure of NCFs could be over 90% after 2.2 s. As a summary, solder joint bonded with NCFs using optimized isothermal bonding parameters showed excellent bump joint resistances and solder wetting on substrate metal pads.