Investigation of conductive adhesive bonding using UV curable anisotropic conductive adhesives at different curing conditions

Generally, adhesive materials can be cured in a short time under high curing temperature. High curing temperature usually leads to an increase in cross-link density and a homologous increase in heat resistance. Nevertheless, curing process under high temperature problems can occur such as the inclination for the adhesive materials to shrinkage, cracks, voids and it would probably lower the dielectric properties. UV curing of anisotropic conductive adhesives (ACAs) offers several advantages over the conventional epoxy resin, including rapid cure, little to no emission of volatile organic compounds and without affecting other components in the assembly [Pataki, W. S., 1997, "Optimization of Free-Radical Initiation Reactions in the Electrical Industry, " Electrical Insulation Conference and Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Conference Proceedings, pp. 745-751]. Based on the aforementioned advantages, it is worth investigating the bonding properties at different curing conditions. In this work, a new type of UV curable ACA for chip-on-flex application is presented. The adhesive bonds of the chip-on-flex application are cured at different cure cycles within a range of UV frequencies. Cure cycles in this work were the different periods of time that were needed to cure the ACAs under different UV light intensities. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy with attenuated total internal reflection was used to investigate the curing degree of the ACAs at different cure cycles. The result shows that the longer the curing time and the larger the UV intensity, the higher the curing degree can be obtained. Furthermore, the curing time in the UV curable ACA was much shorter than that of the conventional thermal curable ACAs. Shear test was done to find out the shear strength of the bonding. Finally, after shear test, scanning electron microscope was used to investigate the fracture mode of the chip-on-flex application at different curing cycles. Copyright © 2005 by ASME.