Rapid pressureless low-temperature sintering of Ag nanoparticles for high-power density electronic packaging

This paper describes a method to achieve rapid pressureless low-temperature sintering of Ag nanoparticles for bonding. Organic shells adsorbing on the surface of Ag nanoparticles to stabilize them were thinned to create a sparse protecting layer. The numerous coherent twin boundaries formed in sintered Ag nanoparticles with a grain size of 21 mu induce ultrahigh thermal conductivity (229 W m(-1) K-1), which overcomes the intrinsic defect that metals with nanosized grains generally exhibit a significantly reduced thermal conductivity because of the grain boundary scattering effect. (C) 2013 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.