Corning "Carrier glass drastically improved ‘bending phenomenon‘ in the advanced package process"

"Corning’s Precision Glass Solutions (PGS) business has grown more than 30 percent compared to two years ago when it was newly established."

Rustum Desai, the director of Corning PSG, stressed in an interview with The Elec on the 31st. Corning's traditionally major source of revenue is glass substrates for display panels. However, PGS has recently been expanding its business area by releasing various solutions for semiconductor and electronic part areas through PGS.

The item Corning PSG emphasizes is the carriers glass, which may be used in the advanced packaging manufacturing process. It is not easy to solve the warpage problem of carrier materials in the advanced packaging process such as having the 2.5D structure by utilizing an interposer or fan-out. Director Desai was confident that "Corning can provide a solution.”

The typical process of fan-out wafer level packaging is as follows; attach an adhesive tape or film over the carrier material. Then, proceed with the Pick-and-Place, the process of picking an individual Semiconductor Die and arrange and place it on the carriers. When the Die arrangement is finished, the surface of package is manufactured by the high EMC (Epoxy Mold Compound) molding process. After the stage of RDL (Redistribution layer) formation, which is electrically conducted, the package is complete.

A fatal problem occurs of carriers being bent during the process using the high temperature such as EMC molding. Unless the bending problem is not fixed, the yield will not be increased. “Fan-out package complexly uses different materials which consists of multiple layers. Since the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) per material of each layer is different, it’s difficult to fix the bending problem” said Director Desai. “Corning’s carrier glass greatly improves this kind of problems.”

Corning emphasizes that CTE in the carrier glass can be adjusted into a very fine unit to supply to clients. High rigidity doesn’t easily allow bending. Date of sample delivery is also very short between four and six weeks. “The Corning’s solution can improve the range of warpage by 40% compared to the existing ones.” said Director Desai. “We provided a sample to our clients, and the response was very positive.”

Corning PSG explained that they would focus on the high-refractive glass for augmented reality (AR), wafer-level optics glass materials for 3D facial recognition solutions and radio frequency (RF) filters and antenna glass materials for 5G communication as well as carrier glass for packaging process to be their core business.

He emphasized "Corning's glass solutions can be applied across the industry."