Materials & Design (Jun 2020)

Radio frequency thermal plasma-processed Ni-W nanostructures for printable microcircuit electrodes

  • Hyunwoong Na,
  • Jae Woo Park,
  • Hanshin Choi,
  • Yong Soo Cho

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 191

Abstract

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Nonconventional alloy systems have been actively investigated to find an appropriate electrode candidate for highly integrated microcircuit applications. Here, a Ni-W nanoscale-alloy system is introduced to modulate the unwanted early densification of Ni nanoparticles by adopting a considerable amount of W in the single-step process of radio frequency thermal plasma synthesis. Multiple phases other than Ni phase, i.e., α-W and β-W, were found to coexist when the content of W was presumably beyond its solid solubility limit in Ni. Noticeable retardation of the densification of Ni was observed depending on the content of W in the resultant film electrodes fired at different temperatures up to 1200 °C. As expected, electrical resistivity of the film electrodes depended on the progress of densification. A large variation of electrical resistivity with different W contents was observed at the low temperature of 900 °C while the variation became very small at high temperatures of >1100 °C for all the films. The successful late densification indicates that the Ni-W alloy system is suitable as a microcircuit electrode with a reasonably low electrical resistivity of ~10−5 Ω cm.

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