1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a semiconductor device, a method of manufacturing the semiconductor device, and an electronic apparatus.
2. Related Art
A semiconductor device such as a thin-film circuit device and a liquid crystal device includes a thin-film circuit layer having a semiconductor element and the like on a surface of a substrate. Examples of a material typically used for the substrate include a single crystal silicon wafer, a quart glass substrate, a heat resistance glass substrate, a resin film, and a stainless substrate. The semiconductor device using the resin film as a substrate is significant in that a light and flexible semiconductor device can be provided since the substrate itself is thin and has flexibility. JP-A-10-125929 is an example of related art.
In case of manufacturing the above semiconductor device, there is employed a so-called multipatterning method in which a plurality of thin-film circuit layers are formed on a motherboard and then the motherboard is divided into thin-film circuit layers. Also, there is a case in which the semiconductor device is manufactured such that the thin-film circuit layers formed on a glass substrate are then transferred, since the resin film has a relatively low heat resistance property, it is thus hard to form the thin-film circuit layer directly thereonto. Generally, the thin-film circuit layer has an elastic constant of about several tens of GPa and a linear expansion coefficient in a range between several and several tens ppm/K. On the other hand, the resin film has an elastic constant of about several GPa and a linear expansion coefficient in a range between 10 and 50 ppm/K.
In the above described semiconductor device, however, end portions of the substrate may include minute cracks and notches formed when the motherboard is divided into individual semiconductor devices. If a concentrated stress is applied to such cracks and notches, the cracks may expand into the thin-film circuit layer, which could lead the thin-film circuit layer to break up. Such breakup of the thin-film circuit layer would cause malfunction of the semiconductor device. Therefore, such a technique is required that the thin-film circuit layer can be prevented from breaking up and thereby being capable of providing a high reliability.