Adhesion enhancement for electroless plating on mold compound for EMI shielding with industrial test compliance

In the manufacturing process, metal capping for EMI shielding is done during the integrated circuit (IC) assembly process, which hinders the attempt of reducing the size of electronic device and also incurs higher cost of assembly. Therefore direct deposition of metal on IC mold compound is desirable. Conventional metal plating techniques, however fail tape test. This paper studies the condition of plating metal directly onto surface of mold compound with the enhancement of novel non-etching adhesion promoter CovaBond MR™. By plating direct onto mold compound, the shielding capping task can be done in array form before the die saw process in IC manufacturing (before IC assembly), which reduce the thickness and dimension of chip and improves design flexibility of circuit board as well as reduce the manufacturing cost. The industrial test results in this paper have proven the performance of the enhanced metal plating technique.