| Wafer bonding is an attractive technology for modern semiconductor and microelectronic industry due to its variability in allowing combination of materials. Initially, the bonding of wafers of the same material, such as silicon-silicon wafer bonding has been major interest. In the meantime, research interest has shifted to the bonding of dissimilar materials such as silicon to quartz or to sapphire. Thermal stress coming from the different expansion coefficients usually is a barrier to the success of dissimilar material bonding. Thermal stress may cause debonding, sliding, cracking, thermal misfit dislocations, or film wrinkle to impair the quality of the transferred layer. This dissertation presents several effective approaches to solve the thermal stress problem. These approaches concern bonding processes (low vacuum bonding and storage), thinning (advanced ion implantation layer splitting), and annealing processes (accumulative effect of blister generation) and are combined to design the best heat-treatment cycle. For this propose the concept of hot bonding is used in order to effectively minimize the thermal mismatch of dissimilar material bonding during the bonding and thinning procedures.;During the initial bonding and bond strengthening phase, the difference in the temperature between bonding and annealing processes should be decreased as much as possible to avoid excessive thermal stresses. This concept can be realized either by increasing the bonding temperature or by decreasing the annealing temperature. A thinning technique has to employed that can thin the device wafer before debonding occurs due to the thermal stress generated either from the cooling-down process in the first case or by the annealing process itself in the late case. The ion implantation layer splitting method, also known as the Smart-cut... |
