Silver alloy wire for IC packaging solution

In recent years, copper wire has been widely proliferated into mass production. However, the hardness of copper wire requires higher ultrasonic power and bonding force, which lead to higher risk of bond pad crack, in order to avoid bond pad crack without re-engineering the bond pad, silver alloy wire is proposed as an alternative to cu wire bonding due to its softer material property. In this paper, the authors researched into process development of silver alloy wire, including fine tuning of material properties, wire bond and assembly process optimization, and reliability assessment.