Manufacture and characterization of elastic interconnection microstructures in silicone elastomer

Abstract: The subject of this thesis is a new chip to substrate interconnection technique using self-aligning elastic chip sockets. This work was focused on the technology steps which are necessary to fulfill in order to realize the suggested technique. Elastic chip sockets offer a solution for several assembly and packaging challenges, such a thermo-mechanical mismatch, effortless rework, environmental compatibility, high interconnection density, high frequency signal integrity, etc.Two of the most challenging technology aspects, metallization and etching of the silicone elastomer were studied, but also, air bubble free casting of the silicone elastomer was taken into consideration. Elastic chip sockets and single elastic micro-bump contacts of different shapes and sizes were manufactured and characterized.The contact resistance measurements revealed that the elastic micro-bump contacts manufactured by using the developed methods require less than one tenth of the contact force to achieve the same low contact resistance as compared to commercial elastic interconnection structures.The analysis and measurements of the high frequency properties of the elastic micro-bump structures have shown that they can operate up to several tens of GHz without a serious degradation of the signal quality.The same methods were applied to manufacture very high density contact area array (approximately 80000 connections/cm2), which until now was achieved only using so called chip-first techniques.The low contact resistance, the absence of environmentally harmful materials, no need of soldering, easy rework as well as capability of very high interconnecting density and very high frequency compatibility, indicates a high potential of this technique for assembly and packaging.Moreover, the presented technology of the silicone elastomer micromachining (metallization and RIE in particular) can be used for manufacturing of other microstructures, like chemical or biological micro reactors.