International Conference on Solid State Devices and Materials

The manufacture of devices requires perfect mastery of cutting-edge technologies. Our team is interested in the problems of reliability that need to be controlled at every stage of the device's design and manufacture. We developed an analytical model able to predict the strains and stresses in each of the layers. This model requires knowledge of realistic mechanical properties of the materials making up the device. Nano-indentation AFM, colored picosecond acoustics and ellipsometry, can be used to characterize the thermo-mechanical properties materials but these techniques have major limitations: the measurements are local and/or perform to the extreme surface of the materials. We have therefore developed a more comprehensive and global characterization method, based on measurements of wafer curvature. First, this method is particularly effective for highlighting cross-linking problems in polymers. We used the method to characterize the thermomechanical properties of various materials used in an imaging device and studied the mechanical integrity of a representative structure using our analytical model and finite element simulations.