Facile Synthesis and the Thermal Properties of Al/Si Composites Prepared via Fast Hot-Pressing Sintering

In this paper, a novel power sintering technique, named fast hot-pressing sintering (FHP), which is able to achieve an ultrahigh heating rate similar to the spark plasma sintering (SPS) technique, but at a much lower cost, was applied to prepare a series of Al/Si composites with different Si volume ratios (12 vol.% to 70 vol.%) to meet the requirements of advanced packaging materials for electronic devices. In contrast to SPS, the FHP oven possesses a safe and budget-friendly current power supply, rather than a complex and expensive pulse power supply, for its heating power. The optimized sintering parameters (temperature, pressure and holding time) of FHP for preparing Al/Si composites were investigated and determined as 470 °C, 300 MPa and 5 min, respectively. In order to characterize the potential of Al/Si composites as packaging materials, thermal conductivities and coefficients of thermal expansion were studied. The thermal conductivity of the Al-40Si composite sintered by the FHP method is higher than that of the conventional SPS method (139 to 107 W m−1 K−1). With the increase in Si, the thermal conductivities and coefficients of thermal expansion on both decreases. Furthermore, the thermal conductivities obey the Agari model, whereas the coefficient of thermal expansion and Si volume ratios obey additivity. The numeric modeling would help develop required packaging materials based on the thermal performances of the substrate materials, like Si or GaAs semiconductor devices.