Delamination modeling of three-dimensional microelectronic systems

Thermo-mechanical reliability issues are major bottlenecks in the development of future microelectronic components. Numerical modeling can provide more fundamental understanding of these failure phenomena. As a result, predicting and ultimately preventing these phenomena will result in an increased reliability of current and future electronic products. In this paper, delamination phenomena occuring in Cu/low-k back-end structures, buckling-driven delamination in flexible electronics and peeling tests on stretchable electronics will be modeled and validated by experimental results. For the Cu/low-k back-end structues, failure sensitivity analysis is performed by the recently developed Area Release Energy (ARE) method while transient delamination processes are described by cohesive zone elements in the critical regions. For the latter, a dedicated solver is applied that is able to deal with brittle interfaces. For the flexible and stretchable electronics applications, cohesive zones are used to characterize the interface properties by combining numerical results with experimental measurements.