A Study of Vacuum Efficiency for Silicon on Insulator Wafers

The development on thinner packages has become the trend and focus in semiconductor packaging industry. The necessity of thinner packages also entails a thinner vertical structure of the integrated circuit (IC) design. As a major contributor on the vertical structure of the IC package, die or wafer is also essential to go thinner. As the wafer goes thinner, various problems may occur during transport and even the back grinding process, itself.

Wafer warpage is one of the main concerns during the process. The effect of proper vacuuming will play major role in processing SOI wafers. Insufficient vacuum may cause non-planar wafer in contact with the chuck table that may result to poorer grinding and worst broken wafer.

Different silicon wafer technology has been released to cater different functionality on different industry markets. One popular silicon technology is Silicon On Insulator (SOI) technology. SOI wafers have a step type passivation wherein the edge of the wafer is observed to have 30um thinner than its center. The stepping effect also contributes to the 0.5mm wafer warpage prior back grinding. Evaluating the effect of vacuum efficiency to eliminate such warpage is discussed on this technical paper.