Hermetic Wafer Bonding by Use of Microwave Heating

Microwave heating is the basis of a simple technique for quickly and gently bonding two metallized dielectric or semiconductor wafers to each other. The technique can be used, for example, to bond a flat, gold-coated silicon wafer to another gold-coated silicon wafer that is flat except for a cavity, in order to hermetically seal the cavity (see figure). The technique has the potential to become a standard one for bonding in the fabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).