High Reliability and High Performance 30μm Through-Package-Vias in Ultra-Thin Bare Glass Interposer

This paper presents, for the first time, the thermo-mechanical reliability and the electrical performance of 30μm through package vias (TPVs) formed by Corning in ultra-thin low-cost bare glass interposers and metallized directly by sputter seed and electroplating. In contrast to glass interposers with polymer coated glass cores reported previously, this paper reports on direct metallization of thin and uncoated glass panels with fine pitch TPVs. The scalability of the unit processes to large panel sizes is expected to result in bare glass interposers at 2 to 10 times lower cost than silicon interposers fabricated using back end of line (BEOL) wafer processes. The thermo-mechanical reliability of 30μm TPVs was studied by conducting accelerated thermal cycling tests (TCT), with most via chains passing 1000 cycles from −55°C to 125°C. The high-frequency behavior of the TPVs was characterized by modeling, design and measurement up to 30 GHz.