A novel mechanical diced trench structure for warpage reduction in wafer level packaging process

The wafer warpage problem, mainly originated from coefficient of thermal expansion mismatch between the materials, becomes serious in wafer level packaging as large diameter wafer is adopted currently. The warpage poses threats to wafer handling, process qualities, and can also lead to serious reliability problems. In this paper, a novel mechanical diced trench structure was proposed to reduce the final wafer warpage. Deep patterned trenches with a depth about 100 mu m were fabricated in the Si substrate by mechanical dicing method. Both experiment and simulation approaches were used to investigate the effect of the trenches on the wafer warpage and the influence of the geometry of the trenches was also studied. The results indicate that, by forming deep trenches, the stress on the individual die is decoupled and the total wafer warpage could be reduced. The final wafer warpage is closely related to the trench depth and die width. Trenched sample with a depth of 100 mu m can decrease the wafer warpage by 51.4%. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.