From Development to Industrialization of a Screen-Printing Process for Wafer-Level Packaging of Miniaturized Sensors

Abstract - This study presents wafer-level packaging using glass-frit bonding to achieve hermetic sensor encapsulation at 8-inch substrate size, ensuring undisturbed performance of several thousand dies per wafer. The screen-printing process was optimized for a miniaturized generation of a MEMS sensor by adapting layout and process parameters, and introducing further improvements described here. For high-volume industrialization, the process was transferred to a fully automated screen-printing tool after prototyping and achieving a production-ready state of the respective processes. Besides the discussion of technical challenges in developing and optimizing the corresponding screen-printing process, the study represents also a best-practice example for a close collaboration between research and industry.