Electroless Copper Deposition Using Complexed Copper(II) Ion As Catalyst for Printed Circuit Board Fabrication

Abstract

Electroless (ELS) copper plating process has been commonly used for printed circuit board (PCB) metallization. The traditional ELS copper plating process uses tin/palladium colloid or complexed palladium ion as catalysts for ELS copper deposition. But the price of palladium catalyst is much higher than that of gold. Herein, we use complexed copper(II) ion to replace the palladium catalyst in order to greatly reduce the process cost but maintain the performance and the reliability of the complexed copper(II) ion as good as palladium. The synthesis process of the complexed copper ion is simple and its cost, which compared with palladium, is cheap. Especially, they have no oxidation issue because they are not metallic copper nanoparticles but copper(II) ions. Before ELS copper plating, the grafted copper(II) ion that is chemically adsorbed onto the substrate surface is reduced to copper atom, so they can catalyze ELS copper deposition. In this work, we optimize the experimental parameters such as operating temperature, reaction time, copper ion concentration and the pH of the plating solution. After ELS plating process, the backlight test of through holes (THs) of a PCB and the morphology of the ELS copper deposited onto the sidewalls of the THs are evaluated by optical microscope (OM) and scanning electron microscope (SEM), respectively. The thermal reliability of the ELS copper deposition catalyzed by the grafted copper catalyst was examined after copper electroplating using thermal shock in a tin bath at 288℃ for ten seconds and repeated it for 5 times. Results show that it can pass the thermal shock test. Therefore, the application of complexed copper(II) ion as the catalyst of ELS copper plating is expected to replace the expensive palladium for PCB fabrication.