MEMS Packaging Presentation, Monday, 11/3/08, 11 am, CIS 101

WaFER LEVEL Vacuum/Hermetic Packaging of MEMS Devices

 

The purpose of this talk is to give an overview of MEMS packaging technologies developed at the Wireless Integrated Microsystems (WIMS) center at the University of Michigan. ePack, Inc. is a spin out of the University of Michigan—a short description of this company will be given at the end of the talk. ePack helps companies and researchers implement packaging technologies in order to encourage the commercialization of their MEMS devices.

Two sets of packaging technologies will be discussed. I) Low temperature wafer-level packaging processes for vacuum/hermeticity will be presented including various solder bonding and localized heating technologies.  Vacuum pressures lower than 10 mTorr were achieved with yields as high as high as 90% and 3 years of package reliability data. II) A harsh environment robust micromechanical technology (HERMIT) for vibration, shock and thermal isolation as well as vacuum packaging.  This technology involves flip chipping MEMS devices onto another wafer which has specially designed vibration/shock/thermal isolation structures where another substrate is then used for batch encapsulation of the devices. This technology was a DARPA funded project was specially developed for high performance gyroscopes, but can be applied to any type of MEMS device.

These technologies are a culmination of several bonding processes, feed-through technologies and various special materials.

Jay Mitchell is president and co-founder of ePack Corp., a company providing packaging services and expertise to companies and researchers in order to bring MEMS devices to market. He finished his doctorate in January of 2008. In the fall of 2002, he began the Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan in mechanical engineering. In his research he developed a Au-Si eutectic wafer-level packaging process and a low temperature localized heating technique for the hermetic/vacuum packaging of MEMS and microsystems.  In 2000 and 2001, he worked for Movaz Networks in the testing and design of micromirrors for telecommunications applications.  He received his B.S. and M.S. from Case Western Reserve University in 1999 and 2000, respectively.  His research interests include: MEMS, micromachining technologies, micromachined sensors, actuators, and micropackaging.