A new technical paper titled “Probing the Nanoscale Onset of Plasticity in Electroplated Copper for Hybrid Bonding Structures via Multimodal Atomic Force Microscopy” was published by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Intel, and Colorado School of Mines.
Excerpt
“The slowdown of Moore’s law has elicited a paradigm shift whereby shrinking of in-plane dimensions is being replaced by 3D-stacking advanced packaging approaches to satisfy the ever-increasing demands for power, performance, area, and cost. Driven by the widespread use of metallic interconnects with submicron pitches, robust metrology for probing mechanical behavior at the nanoscale emerges as a key area of interest in the semiconductor industry. Here, we develop an atomic force microscopy (AFM)-based protocol for characterizing the incipient stages of plasticity and illustrate it on hybrid bonding-ready (prior to bonding) copper pads.”
Find the technical paper here. December 2025.
Alderete, Nicolas A., Paresh D. Daharwal, Cristian V. Ciobanu, and Gheorghe Stan. “Probing the Nanoscale Onset of Plasticity in Electroplated Copper for Hybrid Bonding Structures via Multimodal Atomic Force Microscopy.” ACS Applied Nano Materials (2025). Creative commons license.
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