The Brewer Science^® ZoneBOND™ process is uniquely able to fulfill the industry’s need for a temporary bonding process that offers excellent stability during backside processing coupled with low-stress debonding. The ZoneBOND™ process is elegantly simple, but no less innovative. At the time when it was first conceived, the prevailing wisdom said that it was necessary to have strong adhesive bonds between the polymeric layer and all points on the device wafer and carrier surfaces; otherwise, delamination, buckling, or other distortions of the thin device wafer would occur during backside processing, particularly during high-temperature cycling.

The Brewer Science team had a hunch that strong global bonding might not be necessary to maintain a stable bonded structure, and their work on this concept led to the first iterations of ZoneBOND™ technology. Beginning development in mid-2007, Brewer Science demonstrated and applied for the first of many patents on the process, materials, and equipment in 2008^a,b and then released it to the industry in 2009. We now know that our intuitions proved correct and have since been confirmed by the thousands of 200- and 300-mm thin wafers that have been successfully processed by us, our customers, and industry research consortia using the ZoneBOND™ temporary wafer bonding process.