Laser-Assisted Mist Capillary Self-Alignment

This paper reports a method combining laser die transfer and mist capillary self-alignment. The laser die transfer technique is employed to feed selected microchips from a thermal release tape onto a receiving substrate and mist capillary self-alignment is applied to align the microchips to the predefined receptor sites on the substrate in high-accuracy. The parameters for a low-power laser die transfer process have been investigated and experimentally optimized. The acting forces during the mist-induced capillary self-alignment process have been analyzed and the critical volume enabling capillary self-alignment has been estimated theoretically and experimentally. We have demonstrated that microchips can be transferred onto receptor sites in 300–400 ms using a low-power laser (100 mW), and chips can self-align to the corresponding receptor sites in parallel with alignment accuracy of 1.4 ± 0.8 μm. The proposed technique has great potential in high-throughput and high-accuracy assembly of micro devices. This paper is extended from an early conference paper (MARSS 2017).