Self-Assembly and Electrostatic Carrier Technology for Via-Last TSV Formation Using Transfer Stacking-Based Chip-to-Wafer 3-D Integration

A self-assembly and electrostatic (SAE) carrier technology is developed for high-precision and high-throughput chip-to-wafer 3-D integration. In this paper, water surface tension-driven chip assembly is combined with electrostatic adhesion to keep high alignment accuracies obtained by the capillary self-assembly process. The self-assembled chips can be firmly fixed on an SAE carrier wafer by electrostatic adhesion, and then, the chips can be readily detached from the carrier by discharging and transferred to another carrier with a temporary adhesive. This paper describes the impact of chip clamping forces and electrical reliability of the SAE carrier on chips to be 3-D stacked in chip-to-wafer configuration. Through-Si via formation is demonstrated by using a via-last 3-D integration process based on the SAE carrier. The demonstration shows that the SAE carrier maintains higher chip alignment accuracies than does conventional carrier without electrostatic adhesion.