SUMMARY

Rapid prototyping (RP) technology allows designers to rapidly and less expensively make tangible prototypes of their designs so that they have excellent visual aids for communicating design concepts with co-workers or customers. However, the conventional RP provides only form factors, but not electrical functionality to the prototypes. The electrical functionality is an essential part in microelectronics system packages in terms of promptly assessing novel package designs, new packaging materials, and performance of new devices. Accordingly, this research aims to develop an innovative rapid package prototyping (RPP) technology that provides electrical functionality as well as form factors for microsystems packages. The developed RPP process based on a data-driven chip-first approach using nano-particle silver (NPS) interconnects is achievable using existing technologies and shows reasonable reliability performance. The NPS will be evaluated as an interconnection material because the material has not been adequately proven for use in electronics packaging application. The weakness of the rapid package prototypes has been proven to be the relatively weak adhesion between NPS and polymer substrates such as LCP, Polyimide, and BCB. Thus, improving the adhesion strength of NPS will be the key issue for reliable package prototypes with NPS interconnects. A creative adhesion test method, which is called a modified button shear test (MBST), will be developed because most of the existing adhesion test methods are not directly applicable to NPS films. The MBST is generic in nature and can be extended to other thin films’ adhesion test. Finally, an adhesion prediction model will be developed by integrating existing theories of adhesion mechanisms and experimental results. The adhesion model is intended to provide a general and explicit relation between NPS adhesion and adhesion factors and thus, to improve the interfacial fracture toughness of NPS films.