High reliable and high bonding strength of silver sintered joints on copper surfaces by pressure sintering under air atmosphere

Abstract

AbstractSilver sintering is a promising die attach technology for high temperature power electronics packaging. Our previous studies have revealed that highly reliable sintered joints was obtained on silver and gold surfaces by either non-pressure or pressure sintering. In this paper, we extended our study to die attachment on copper surfaces by pressure sintering under air atmosphere. We attached Ag metallized die on silicon nitride active metal braze copper substrates with Ag metallization and without metallization by silver sintering at 230°C with a pressure of 10 MPa for 3 min. We observed that the average initial die shear strength for bare Cu substrate is lower than for Ag metallized substrate. This observation is attributed to the self-diffusion of Ag is faster than the interdiffusion between Ag and Cu. However, the average die shear strength for all samples increased considerably after temperature cycling test (−40°C/+150°C) and high temperature storage at 250°C. It is highly likely that sintering process is not yet completed under the sintering conditions used in this study and consequently Ag and Cu continued to diffuse during thermal cycling and high temperature storage and as a result strengthen the sintered joints. It is believed that after a certain time of storage at 250°C the sintering process is completed as we observed the average die shear strength remained relatively constant after 250 h storage. Voids, drying channels and delamination in the sintered joints were not detected by scanning acoustic microscopy for the samples before and after 2000 thermal cycles.