Improvement on Conductivity for Thick Film Aluminum Paste

With the development of thick-film paste, silver and copper are circulating in the market as the electric conductive fillings currently. Unfortunately, the cost of silver is exceedingly high, while the copper has to be sintered in the reducing atmosphere. In this study, we proposed to exert aluminum as the filling due to its low cost, good electrical conductivity, and capability of being sintered in air. By means of the fracture mechanism of the oxidation layer of the Al surface and the liquid phase sintering, the Al paste with high solid content is used to implement high electrical conductivity. Based on that Al powder with large particle size tends to fracture easily, while it is easy for Al powder with small size to fill the gap, we mixed Al powder with large and small particle sizes at different proportion, so that the internal micro-structure and the oxidization are observed. However, when glass frit was added into mixed Al powder, the Al particles are wet by glass frit for bonding Al particles as well as inhibiting oxidation. Effect of the glass frit content and the solid content of Al paste on conductivity are investigated in this study. The sheet resistance of Al paste sintered at 850 °C for 10 min. can be reduced to 4.5 mΩ/□ when Al paste is formulated based on the mixed Al particles with proportion of big to small (4:1) at 10 wt% glass frit content and 80 wt% solid content.