Degradation of silicone-based sealing materials used in microelectronics

Adhesive bonding is a key joining technology in many industrial applications, including automotive, aerospace industries, biomedical devices, and microelectronic components. Adhesive bonding is gaining more and more attention due to the increasing demand for joining similar or dissimilar components, mostly within the framework of designing lightweight structures. Silicone sealant is widely used in engineering application due to its thermal stability, excellent energy absorption, and good damping characteristics. In those applications, sealant usually exposed to various environment stress, such as, high temperature, mechanical stress, humidity, light radiation, and chemical attack. Long-term stability and durability of sealant is crucial to the performance of the associated application. The main degrading factors for silicone in microelectronic applications are temperature, humidity, alkali, and mechanical loading. The focus in the present paper is to understand different failure mechanisms in silicone sealants and adhesives and to study how different environmental, mechanical, and service-related stresses attribute to the kinetics and extent of degradation in silicone sealants and adhesives. The impact of different failure mechanisms on the lifetime and reliability of microelectronic devices will be methodically investigated.