A novel environmentally friendly and biocompatible curing agent for lead-free electronics

In order to accommodate environmental considerations, the environmentally friendly and biocompatible materials become increasingly important and attract a lot of research interest in recent years, while application of biocompatible materials are still in its infancy. In this paper, the biochemical building blocks, amino acid is used as a novel environmentally benign and biologically compatible curing agent in epoxy system. Amino acids have both amine and carboxylic functional groups, both of which could participate in the reaction with epoxy. The curing capability of amino acid with epoxy is evaluated by measuring the heat flow and glass transition temperature using differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). In-situ Fourier transfer infrared (FTIR) spectra are used to determine the curing mechanism of amino acid with epoxy. The reaction of amino acid and epoxy is due to the lone pair electrons of the primary amine which provides high reactivity in curing the epoxy resin. The thermal stability of the cured epoxy was investigated by measuring the weight change with various temperatures. Novel lead-free, environmentally and biologically friendly electronic materials are developed for next generation nano bioelectronic packaging applications