Intermetallic Growth Kinetics of Recycled Gold Bonding Wire

Recently recycled semiconductor direct materials are being extensively discussed due to corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability. Memory industry relies heavily on gold wire as direct materials for first level die-to-substrate interconnection. Thus, this draws the attention to explore recycling gold wires and become one of the most popular approaches adopted in the market. Recycled gold extracted from scrapped consumer electronic parts are eventually refined to be high purity 99.99% recycled Au wires. In this study, one fresh 4N gold wire regarded as baseline and three types of recycled 4N gold wire candidates are selected to characterize. The reliability testing including high temperature storage (HTS), biased/un-biased highly accelerated stress test (HAST), and temperature cycling test (TCT) are studied. In addition, the growth kinetics of intermetallic compounds (IMCs) under high temperature storage are also calculated, and the data presents similar activation energy (Ea) on recycled wire and fresh wire supplied by the same wire supplier.