Mechanisms for room temperature direct wafer bonding

Reducing the temperature needed for high strength bonding which was and is driven by the need to reduce effects of coefficient of thermal expansion mismatch, reduce thermal budgets, and increase throughput has led to the development of plasma treatment procedures capable of bonding Si wafers below 300 °C with a bond strength equivalent to Si bulk. Despite being widely used, the physical and chemical mechanisms enabling low temperature wafer bonding have remained poorly understood. We developed an understanding of the beneficial surface modifications by plasma and a model based on short range low temperature diffusion through bonding experiments combined with results from spectroscopic ellipsometry, depth resolving Auger electron spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy measurements. We also present experimental results showing that even at room temperature reasonable bond strength can be achieved. We conclude that the gap closing mechanism is therefore a process which balances the lowering of the total energy by minimizing the sum of the free surface energy (maximizing the contact area between the surfaces) and strain energy in the oxide at the bond interface.