Low-Temperature Bonding Technology for Heterogeneous Integration and Advances in Sensors and Electronic Devices

Prof. Eiji Higurashi

Tohoku University, Japan

Abstract: 

In recent years, bonding technology has attracted considerable attention and has become increasingly important for realizing high-performance multifunctional semiconductor devices with small size, low power consumption, high thermal dissipation, and high output power. Low-temperature bonding technology with advanced features such as low thermal damage and low residual stress is becoming important for heterogeneous integration, which is key to the continued growth of the semiconductor industry in the future. In this presentation, I will focus on low-temperature bonding technology and introduce recent research topics in electronic devices. Surface-activated bonding is a method of bonding activated solid surfaces using the adhesive force between surface atoms. It requires extremely smooth bonding surfaces (root-mean-square roughness: 1 nm or less), and there was a major issue of difficulty in bonding when ultra-precision polishing processing could not be applied. In response, we developed a smoothing method using additive processing, which significantly expanded the range of bonding targets.

Speaker's Biography: 

Eiji Higurashi received the M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1991 and 1999, respectively. He was a researcher at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) from 1991 to 2003, an Associate Professor with the University of Tokyo from 2003 to 2019, and a Team or Group Leader at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) from 2017 to 2022. He has been a Professor at Tohoku University since 2022.

He has been serving as the president of the Japan Institute of Electronics Packaging (JIEP) since May 2025 and a 2024-2026 elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society (EPS). He served as the IEEE EPS Japan Chapter Chair from 2021 to 2022, General Chair of the International Conference on Electronics Packaging (ICEP) from 2020 to 2021, and General Chair of ICSJ (IEEE CPMT Symposium Japan) in 2024. He has authored or co-authored more than 350 journal and conference papers. His current research interests include heterogeneous integration based on low-temperature bonding and its applications in future electronic devices.