Effect of Surface Roughening of Temperature-Cycled Ceramic-Metal-Bonded Substrates on Thermomechanical Reliability of Sintered-Silver Joints

We studied the reliability of power chip die-attach by sintered-silver on two types of ceramic-metal-bonded substrates: 1) aluminum-nitride direct-bond-aluminum (DBA) and 2) active-metal-brazed (AMB) silicon nitride-copper. The samples underwent a temperature-cycling test from -55 °C to 250 °C. Consistent with what we reported earlier, the surface roughness on both substrates grew with number of t...