The effect of polyimide surface chemistry and morphology on critical stress intensity factor

The increasingly severe demands of concurrently increasing die size while reducing the package size have made the mechanical stability of IC packaging technologies a grave concern. The dominant failure is caused at the interface between dissimilar materials. To investigate the effect of polyimide surface morphology and chemistry on the epoxy molding compound adhesion, the polyimide samples were characterized by X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, attenuated total reflection and interfacial adhesion tests. The results of the characterization and an explanation of the primary factors affecting interfacial adhesion are presented in this paper.