Enabling ceramic circuit technologies for wireless microelectronics packaging

XPS and AFM investigations on silver‐based photoimageable thick film systems

“…The complexity of portable electronic systems increases from the mobile phone to the Interactive Mobile Multi Media Personal Communicator (Said et al, 1996). With such paradigm shift in communication technology, greater demands are being placed on the mass production of low power, low weight, and compact packaging technologies (Lau and Lee, 2001;Barnwell and O'Neill, 1997) for VLSI integrated circuits. Similar trend is also observed in case of many aerospace and military applications.…”

“…For this purpose, we mainly relied on surface sensitive technique such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) to characterize the photoimageable thick films in the form of unexposed, exposed and fired patterns. It is opined that such in depth analysis is necessary for the samples having potential applications in flip chip, microwave, and RF circuits (Barnwell and O'Neill, 1997;Barnwell and Wood, 1997). Although number of studies on the weathering of thick films have focused on monitoring the mechanical properties and the surface morphology by using scanning electron microscopy (Ketkar et al, 2006), until now no attempt has been made to carry out XPS and AFM investigations on photoimageable thick film patterns.…”

Low cost high performance microwave structures fabricated by advanced thick film techniques

“…Traditional thick film technology was unable to compete with thin film technology considering microwave specifications due to poor line resolution and high losses of thick films. Rapid development in novel thick-film material systems and advanced thick film circuit patterning techniques have changed this view and proved that thick film technology reaches beyond former limitations (Barnwell et al, 1998;Barnwell and O'Neil, 1997;Kemppinen et al, 1997).…”