A Novel Pick-Up and Place Process for FO-WLP Using Tape Expansion Machine Device

Wafer Level Package (WLP) is a packaging technology focusing on IC packaging at wafer level instead of chip level. Conventional WLPs are designed for fan-in chip scale packaging but the shrinkage of pad pitch and size at the chip to package interface is much faster than the shrinkage at the package to board interface. Fan-Out Wafer Level Package (FO-WLP) is key technology to solve this problem. FO-WLP is generally break into two categories: Mold-first and RDL-first. General Mold-first FO-WLP process steps are follows. 1) Wafer patterning form, 2) Wafer mount on the dicing tape, 3) Dicing, 4) Pick-up and place chips to separate it to necessary distance onto carrier material, silicon or glass wafer, 5) Mold to cover the whole chips, 6) Remove the carrier material, 7) Redistribution Layer (RDL) form, 8) Under Bump Metallization, 9) BGA Ball attach and reflow 10) Dicing. The merit of WLP is wafer level process instead of chip level to decrease manufacturing cost. However, process step 4, pick-up and place is still chip level process, thus this process is a bottleneck process for FO-WLP. We propose a novel pick-up and place process for FO-WLP using tape expansion machine device. We develop a tape expansion machine device that can expand a tape to X-Y lateral expansion, individual control for X-Y. Using this machine device, tape can be widely expanded to control the distance of chip to chip voluntarily.