Contact Drying of Printed Sinterable-Silver Paste

Drying of stencil-, screen-, or dispense-printed paste is a crucial, yet taken-for-granted, presintering step for sinterable-silver (SS) interconnect processing and ultimately its reliability. If the paste's solvent is not sufficiently removed during drying, then entrapped gas can result, and that leads to the formation of thermal-, strength-, and reliability-limiting defects in the later-sintered interconnect layer. Presently advocated drying strategies for wet silver paste cause either a limit of associated size or area or require pressure assistance during subsequent sintering. Alternatively, open-face contact drying (OContDry) from contact heating or conductive heating (a method used in industrial processes) offers the potential to overcome those limitations with SS paste. However, satisfactory strength of its final sintered structure must be proven prior to any potential adoption. In this paper, the achievement of a combination of relatively large shear failure stress with low scatter for OContDry SS was demonstrated. This is significant because OContDry enables greater processing versatility with SS interconnects and several other advantages too.