Chemothermal modeling and finite-element analysis for microwave cure process of underfill in flip-chip packaging

The reaction kinetics of microwave cure process of underfill materials in flip-chip packaging was investigated with nonisothermal kinetic method and compared with that of the thermal cure. Three-dimensional (3-D) nonlinear cure kinetic and transient heat transfer coupled model was solved by finite-element method (FEM) to simulate the microwave cure process. The accuracy of the program was verified using a simple heat conduction case by commercial FEM software. Temperature and conversion inside underfill during microwave cure process were evaluated by solving the nonlinear anisotropic heat conduction equation including internal heat generation produced by exothermic chemical reactions. Numerical results show that the iteration calculations are very sensitive to small changes in time step sizes. It was also found that variable frequency microwave can process underfill materials with uniform conversion under different curing temperatures.