Plating reliability and high frequency testing of DuPont™ GreenTape™ 9K7 LTCC

Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) with low dielectric loss is suitable for use on microwave and millimeter wave circuits. Thick film gold or silver conductors are used as metallization on LTCC substrates. Gold prices are increasing at a rapid rate, so efforts were made to lower the dependency on gold by substituting silver with Ni/Au surface finishes as the top conductor. The external thick film silver conductors were plated using a standard Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold (ENIG) process. The Ni/Au surface finishes provides substantial improvement to fretting corrosion, environmental protection, contact resistance, wire bond strengths, solder ability and solder joint reliability. The reliability testing of DuPont™ GreenTape™ 9K7 LTCC with Ni/Au surface finishes is being conducted. The reliability test methods & conditions were chosen from well-established industry standard test protocols. This paper reports the reliability and high frequency testing results on the ENIG plated GreenTape™ 9K7 LTCC system.