EV Group (EVG) of St Florian, Austria, a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical system), nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, says that it is developing equipment and process technology to enable covalent bonds at room temperature.
The technology will be available on a new equipment platform, EVG580 ComBond, which will include process modules that are designed to perform surface preparation processes on both semiconductor materials and metals. EVG says that it has built on its decades of experience with plasma-activated wafer bonding to create a process through which the treated surfaces form strong bonds at room temperature instantaneously without the need for annealing.
“In response to market needs for more sophisticated integration processes for combining materials with different coefficients of thermal expansion, we have developed a revolutionary process technology that enables the formation of bond interfaces between heterogeneous materials at room temperature,” says Markus Wimplinger, corporate technology development & IP director. “Our unparalleled expertise in wafer bonding process technology will allow us to provide different variants of the new process according to the requirements of different substrate materials and applications,” he adds.
EVG says that its new process solutions will enable covalent combinations of compound semiconductors, other engineered substrates and heterogeneous materials integration for applications such as silicon photonics, high-mobility transistors, high-performance/low-power logic devices and novel RF devices. The process technology and equipment that enables this room-temperature covalent wafer bonding will be applied to EVG’s wafer bonding solutions for MEMS wafer-level packaging as well as to the integration of MEMS and CMOS devices.
Equipment systems based on a 200mm modular platform, tailored for the specific needs of the new processes, will be available this year.
