3D Printed Porous Dielectric Layers for Low Dielectric Applications

Abstract

3D printing is an additive manufacturing (AM) technique that constructs successive layers of materials to create three-dimensional architectures. Due to the possibility to build rapid prototypes in almost any geometry and internal structure, 3D printing has drawn much attention for development of advanced materials and equipment for a wide range of applications including biotechnology, microfluidics, aerospace, energy, and electronics. Among the recently developed 3D printing applications, electronics fabricated by 3D printing are becoming increasingly attractive due to simple manufacturing process and more complicated 3D structures compared with electronics fabricated by traditional mechanical manufacturing process such as drilling and milling. In 3D printing electronics, material properties are directly related to performance of 3D designed electronics. Thus, it is important to develop good printable materials for 3D printing electronics such as high conductive material and low dielectric constant material. Especially, for the dielectrics, the low dielectric constant material can solve the electric drawbacks such as interconnection or signal delay for high performance devices. Introducing-porous structures into a polymer matrix is attractive approach to decreasing the dielectric constant by providing an architecture containing embedded air pockets (with a dielectric constant of 1). In this work, we employed azodicarbonamide as a forming agent in 3D printable dielectric material to control the porosity of the dielectric film. The printed dielectric film was heated to 210 oC. As a result, a microporous structure was developed in the film and the morphologies was studied by SEM images. The details of the porous structures of our films, together with the dielectric properties of the 3D printed layer evaluated, will be presented at the session. Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the National Research Council of Science & Technology (NST) grant by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. CRC-15-03-KIMM).