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

The increasingly severe demands of concurrently increasing die size while r educing the package size have made the mechanical stability of IC packaging technologies a grave concern. The dominant failure is caused at the interf ace between dissimilar materials. To investigate the effect of polyimide su rface morphology and chemistry on the epoxy molding compound adhesion, the polyimide samples were characterized by X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, a tomic force microscopy, attenuated total reflection and interfacial adhesio n tests. The results of the characterization and an explanation of the prim ary factors affecting interfacial adhesion are presented in this paper. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.