Ming Jui (Carl) Li
Congratulations to graduate students Sreejith Kochupurackal Rajan and Ming Jui (Carl) Li [ASCENT graduate student] on receiving the Best Student Paper Award at the International 3D Systems Integration Conference, held October 8-10 in Sendai, Japan. The title of the award winning paper is “High density and low-temperature interconnection enabled by mechanical self-alignment and electroless plating.” Their co-authors include Muhannad Bakir (their PhD advisor) and Gary May (Co-advisor of Sreejith).
The paper presents the use of mechanical self-alignment in conjunction with metal electroless deposition as a method to facilitate low temperature, low pressure, and high interconnect density inter-die bonding in heterogeneous 2.5D and 3D ICs. This method is a highly scalable alternative to the conventional solder-based interconnects, but comes without the stringent requirements including high temperature tolerance, high pressure process, extreme surface planarity and cleanliness, and very accurate initial alignment requirements of Cu-Cu (copper-copper) direct bonding. The conjunction with mechanical self-alignment, which has demonstrated sub-micron alignment accuracies, also helps scale the pitch easily, as well as provide a platform to create polylithic systems with large number of individual chip.