Silicon Wafer Bonding Technology for VLSI and MEMS Applications

By bonding a thin wafer of active silicon to a thicker wafer via a layer of insulating oxide to form an SOI structure it is possible to substantially improve the performance and integration of microelectronic circuits produced by very large scale integration (VLSI). For example, the recently announced IBM Power 4 'server-ona- chip' integrates two microprocessors, a high bandwidth system switch, a large memory cache and input/output functions. SOI wafer bonding is also an enabling technology in the rapidly growing field of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).