Cool bond between companies
Both companies will combine experience in wafer bonding technologies to integrate production-proven, next-generation low-temperature bond equipment and processes to the industry.
. SiGen contributes plasma bonding intellectual property (IP) portfolio and related process technologies. EVG and SiGen have been working together on new developments in modular equipment design for plasma-activated wafer bonding since 1998.
A high throughput, LowTemp Dry Activated Plasma Bonding module will now be offered on EVG's wafer bonding systems and cluster platforms. Both ex-situ and in-situ wafer-bonding chambers are available including aligned wafer bonding.
By applying plasma activation, the surface chemistry of two materials to be bonded can be tailored to allow formation of stronger chemical bonds than for non-activated surfaces. This leads to a significant decrease of the annealing temperature (usually more than 50%) and annealing time.
The EVG LowTemp Dry Activated Plasma bonding process can be applied not only to silicon direct bonding for silicon-on-insulator (SOI) or strained silicon fabrication but also to applications in the field of compound semiconductors and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).
EVG competitor SUSS MicroTec has developed its own method of plasma surface activation and wafer to wafer bonding for silicon on insulator (SOI) and strained silicon applications, called nano PREP (Bulletin 502, October 9, 2003).
