Engineering New Package Ideal Materials Using Polymer Resins and Nanoparticles

The trend in new electronic packages is to deliver smaller, thinner space-sensitive packages that meet or exceed customer package reliability expectations. This poses new material challenges in terms manufacturability and reliability. Size, space and manufacturability constrain typical packaging material choices available to meet the desired package performance. This often results in non optimal package performance and some times results in severe reliability challenges. Instead of compromising reliability expectations, the proposed approach engineers new materials to meet or exceed the desired packaging performance while meeting manufacturability criteria. In this paper, nano-particles are used as filler particles for polymer resins to modify the composite material properties. However, instead of a trial and error approach, a predictive simulation based approach is used to achieve the desired results. Advanced nonlinear finite element methodology first determines the desired material properties necessary to meet package reliability requirements. Then, achievable material property variations for a system of polymer resins and nano-particles are predicted. The optimal match is determined between achievable properties and those that will maximize package reliability. A new material was formulated using the predicted polymer resin nano-particle combination. Formulation addressed additional manufacturability issues of uniform dispersion, particle surface chemistry and a manufacturing necessity of photo definition capability. Mechanical properties were characterized to validate the property prediction capability. This validated simulation based approach is very effective in determining the ideal formulation resulting in the desired achievable properties and package reliability.