Plasma cleaning has been used extensively in the IC packaging industry for cleaning assembly materials to improve its cleanliness for the subsequent process, and enhance the overall package or device reliability. One of the challenges is how to establish the compatibility of the cleaning process as various materials are exposed to the plasma. The control of contamination is very important with the recent use of Cu wires in IC packaging. Bond pad corrosion has been found to be critical in device and package reliability and this is one of the main issues that will be tackled in this paper. Evaluation results that include surface analysis and reliability testing using the different plasma cleaning configurations and its other applications will be presented.
