Sol-Gel Processing of Glasses and Glass-Ceramics for Microelectronic Packaging

Abstract

In recent years considerable progress has been made in electronic packaging substrate technology. The future need of miniaturization of devices to increase the signal processing speeds calls for an increase in the device density requiring the substrates to be designed for better thermal, mechanical and electrical efficiency.Fast signal propagation with minimum delay requires the substrate to possess very low dielectric constant. Several glasses and glass-ceramic materials have been identified over the years which show good promise as candidate substrate materials. Among these borophosphate and borophosphosilicate glass-ceramics have been recently identified to have the lowest dielectric constant (3.8). Sol-gel processing has been used to synthesize borosilicate, borophosphosilicate and borophosphate glasses and glass-ceramics using inexpensive boron oxide and phosphorus pentoxide precursors. Preliminary results of the processing of these gels and the effect of volatility of boron alkoxide and its modification on the gel structure are described. X-ray diffraction, Differential thermal analyses and FTIR have been used to characterize the as-prepared and heat treated gels.