...) and microcrack propagation, appearing in actual solder microbumps of flip chip interconnects due to thermal cyclic loading. In addition, a refraction-contrast imaging technique was simultaneously applied to visualize the fatigue cracks with an actual opening of less than 100 nm. The observed specimen has a flip...

... stages: 1) formation of a surface (blind) microcrack (or a grid of surface microcracks) using a double thermal shock method, and 2) splitting the cracked wafer into chips along the microcrack contour by applying small bending stresses. The emphasis was given to splitting of thin wafers with the thickness...