Improved stability of contact resistance of low melting point alloy incorporated isotropically conductive adhesives

With the driving force of "green" revolution in the electronics industry, tremendous efforts have been made in pursuing lead-free alternatives. Although lately lead-free alloys have drawn a lot of attention, their technical weaknesses, such as high processing temperature, poor wetting and high surface tension, limit their applications on the thermally sensitive, flexible, nonsolderable substrates and the ultra-fine pitch size flip chip interconnection. Conventional isotropically conductive adhesives (ICAs) have been used widely in surface mount and die-attach technologies for electrical interconnection and heat dissipation. The low temperature processing of ICAs is one of the major advantages over lead-free solders, which brings a low system stress, simple manufacture process and the like. In order to enhance the contact resistance of ICAs, the low melting point alloy (LMA) incorporating technology has been developed by our group. In this paper, LMA fusing methods were studied, since nonfused LMA in ICAs after a curing process can adversely affect the physical property and contact resistance stability. A differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) was used for the basic examination of depleting rate of LMAs in the typical ICAs. The cross-sectional morphology, LMA distribution and intermetallic compound were investigated by a scanning electron microscope (SEM). In addition, contact resistance for the ICA formulation incorporated with LMAs under elevated temperature and humidity was evaluated.