Void Suppression in Glass Frit Bonding Via Three-Step Annealing Process

In this work, void formation was systematically observed for the glass frit bonding technique as a function of the annealing temperature, annealing time, and annealing ambient. High annealing temperature and long annealing time were adopted to reach the maximum heat flux to avoid voids/bubbles. As demonstrated in the experiments, the voids appearing during glass frit bonding are related to the quantity of byproducts from the combustion of organic matter. The experimental results indicate that solely in air, under vacuum, or annealed for short time, the combustion products cannot be fully degassed, and voids occur. It was shown that the alternating three-step conditioning process including glass liquid forming in air, bubble removal under vacuum, and void filling-up in air can lead to void-free and uniform wafer bonding. The glass frit bonding samples with lots of voids/bubbles were compared to the ones without any defects.