Abstract:
Today, the MEMS sensors industry has acquired from the smartphone market a strong experience in inertial sensors, microphones, and pressure or environmental sensors. Based on this experience, the MEMS players have pushed the boundaries of performance and size
The interest of MEMS relies in the miniaturization and lower cost manufacturing brought by a semiconductor technology
Trends is clearly to reduce package surface to be able to ease MEMS integration in small devices. MEMS packages are key to achieve such small form factor to be able to ease MEMS integration in small devices and therefore enable more than 50% in package size reduction
First of all, MEMS and sensor package costs are relatively high (often 40-60% of the overall cost) in addition to the large size of the package. Secondly, some sensors such as TPMS and IMU modules are becoming more and more complex driven by the need for a higher level of integration.
One of the solution which drives form factor, integration as well as cost is the integration of TSV in capping or in MEMS IC.
Today, 3D Integration of TSV is already in production for MEMS and sensor applications. Avago is in production for their FBAR filters, VTI and STMicroelectronics are in production for MEMS inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes). Other applications are entering the market (silicon microphones from Sonion, fingerprint sensors from IDEX, and more) and a high level of activity is currently running on 1500mm in MEMS foundries such as Silex, Teledyne Dalsa, Touch Microsystems Technology, IMT MEMS but 200mm facilities are ramping-up. Besides, TSV integration combined with wafer level package enables very small form factor. mCube has announced the smallest packaged 3-Axis Accelerometer combining 3D heterogenous integration with Tunsgten TSV achieving only 1,21mm² package surface and will achieve a reduction of 70% in package surface using WLCSP with TSV!
The talk will give an overview and a better understanding of the technology and trends for MEMS packaging