Proceedings Article | 11 February 2011
KEYWORDS: Microelectromechanical systems, Packaging, Semiconducting wafers, Reliability, Sensors, Nanostructures, Silicon, Photonics, Wafer bonding, Telecommunications
The last decade witnessed an explosive growth in research and development efforts devoted to MEMS devices and
packaging. The successfully developed MEMS devices are, for example inkjet, pressure sensors, silicon microphones,
accelerometers, gyroscopes, MOEMS, micro fuel cells and emerging MEMS. For the next decade, MEMS/MOEMS and
nanodevice based products will penetrate into IT, telecommunications, automotive, defense, life sciences, medical and
implantable applications. Forecasts say the MEMS market to be $14 billion by 2012. The packaging cost of
MEMS/MOEMS products in general is about 70 percent. Unlike today's electronics IC packaging, their packaging are
custom-built and difficult due to the moving structural elements. In order for the moving elements of a MEMS device to
move effectively in a well-controlled atmosphere, hermetic sealing of the MEMS device in a cap is necessary. For some
MEMS devices, such as resonators and gyroscopes, vacuum packaging is required. Usually, the cap is processed at the
wafer level, and thus MEMS packaging is truly a wafer level packaging. In terms of MEMS/MOEMS and nanodevice
packaging, there are still many critical issues need to be addressed due to the increasing integration density supported by
3D heterogeneous integration of multi-physic components/layers consisting of photonics, electronics, rf, plasmonics, and
wireless. The infrastructure of MEMS/MOEMS and nanodevices and their packaging is not well established yet. Generic
packaging platform technologies are not available. Some of critical issues have been studied intensively in the last years.
In this paper we will discuss about processes, reliability, testing and characterization of MEMS/MOEMS and nanodevice
packaging.
