Thin Film Packaging Reinforcement for Overmolded MEMS
Thin Film packaging (TFP) is now well known at CEA/LETI and mainly used as a protection for MEMS against degradation which can occur during back end processes: TFP is strong enough to endure the mechanical constraints due to grinding, handling and protects the device from water during the sawing step. Our TFP process is also compatible with under bump metallisation, balling and flip chip processes. The main advantages of our TFP is a very low lost of silicon area, a low cost process with 3 mask levels, and is performed on equipments commonly used in IC fab. In this paper we will speek about process improvement for a TFP overmolded. The thermo-mechanical constraints due to the standard overmolding step (100 bars and 200°C) are much more challenging for TFP: the cavity is about 5 μm high, the cap layer 2μm thick and the polymer plugging layer 6μm thick. So TFP needs to be reinforced to withstand these high constraints. Two processes using conventional IC manufacturing technologies have been developed at wafer level with two materials. 200μm and 500μm wide cavities with TFP were reinforced with these processes and first tested under pneumatically pressure at room temperature: in case of contact between the cap and the substrate, a short circuit is measured between one electrode on the substrate and another electrode behind the cap. Then, the same devices were overmolded at 75 bars and 100 bars at 185°C. In the same run, BAW resonators with TFP and one type of reinforcement were overmolded at 100 bars. The electrical performances of these resonators after overmolding fit very well to the modelling of the test card and are very good. This Compatibility between TFP and overmolding constraints could be a cost effective solution in MEMS packaging.