Hymite boasts testing breakthrough

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Feb 20, 2004

Hymite A/S and NanoFocus AG announced that they have achieved a major breakthrough in wafer-level hermeticity testing of packaged optoelectronic components and MEMS devices that use Hymite's proprietary HyShell and HyCap chip scale packaging technology.

Many types of electronic and photonic components and MEMS devices require the protection of a hermetic package for reliability reasons. Verifying that a packaged component is hermetic is currently done by testing each individual packaged component separately. This is an expensive process and testing multiple packages at the same time is a significant contribution to lowering the cost of packaging. Until now, the technology has not been available to identify which packages fail the test if many packages are tested at the same time. Hymite and NanoFocus are making this possible with their joint innovation.

Hymite manufactures hermetic packages for optoelectronic and MEMS components. With the product lines HyShell and HyCap the company applies innovative wafer-level technology to chip packaging. "Hermeticity is an important feature of our product platform" says Jochen Kuhmann, CTO and founder of Hymite. "It ensures that expected lifetimes can be met. In many cases hermeticity is even a requirement for the devices to function."

Hymite and NanoFocus have jointly developed an optical leak detector for Hymite's proprietary HyShell and HyCap products. The leak detector is based on NanoFocus' [mu]Scan profilometer and enables low-cost wafer-level hermeticity testing against Telcordia specifications covering the full range from gross leak to very fine leak testing.

Using the new detector and Hymite's chip scale packaging technology whole wafers of packaged components can now be tested in a single operation that identifies those packages that fail a fine leak hermeticity test.