Ultrasonic bonding for MEMS sealing and packaging

The feasibility of ultrasonic bonding for hermetic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) packaging has been demonstrated utilizing the solid phase vibration and welding process to bond two elements rapidly at low temperature. Two different approaches have been developed including lateral and vertical ultrasonic bonding setups with three sets of material bonding systems: In-to-Au, Al-to-Al, and plastics-to-plastics. The process utilizes purely mechanical vibration energy to enable low temperature bonding between similar or dissimilar materials without precleaning of the bonding surfaces. In these prototype demonstrations, the typical bonding process used tens of Watts at room temperature environment and the bonds were accomplished within seconds for bonding cavities with areas of a few mm². Preliminary tests show that packaged MEMS cavities can survive gross leakage tests by immersing the bonded chip into liquids. As such, ultrasonic bonding could potentially be broadly applied for hermetic MEMS sealing and packaging especially where temperature limitation is a critical issue. Ultrasonic polymeric bonding could be applied for capping polymer-based microfluidic chips. This paper describes the ultrasonic bonding and hermetic sealing processes as well as the characterizations of bonding tools and equipment setups.