A study of partial layout of adhesive on the thermal drift of MEMS capacitive accelerometers

Abstract

The die attachment adhesive is commonly fully deposited on the substrate to connect the chips and the package shell in the packaging of microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices. The packaging stress and deformation will be changed under temperature variation and further impact the thermal stability of devices. This paper describes a partial layout of die attachment adhesive used in a comb MEMS capacitive accelerometer, which can attenuate the thermal deformation and reduce the thermal drift of the sensor. The accelerometers with the bonded area designed from the global portion to nonsensitive portion of the sensor die are modeled by using finite element analysis (FEA) to study the deformation of the sensitive component induced by temperature change, and the corresponding thermal drift is obtained by simulation and theoretical methods. Both the results indicate that the thermal drift will decrease when the length of the unbonded area is larger than about 700 μm, and when the adhesive bonds only in the area of the nonsensitive portion of the sensor, the thermal drift will reduce about 19% relative to the global attachment. The partial layout of die attachment adhesive is therefore a useful method to improve the thermal stability for stress-sensitive MEMS devices.