Study into high temperature reliability of isotropic conductive adhesive

With the rapid development of technologies for high density assembly and packaging in electronic industry, isotropic conductive adhesive (ICA) has been paid more and more attention as a potential substitute for solder, due to its advantages of low processing temperature, simple processing conditions and good manufacturability. However, studies into the reliability of ICA are not as abundant as those of solder. As a composite material, the failure feasibility of ICA not only depends not only on the variation in performance of different constituent parts, such as high temperature aging of the polymer, aging due to moisture absorption and oxidization of filler particles, but also on interface changes. Thus, the failure mechanism of ICA seems to be complicated and studies into the reliability of ICA are also necessary. Reliability in humidity and heat has been investigated in previous works, and in this paper high temperature reliability will be studied as a comparison. Some reliability tests and results will be given and some failure mechanisms discussed. Finally, we present some discussion about the further optimization of reliability for follow-up studies.