Sintered-Silver Bonding of High-Temperature Piezoelectric Ceramic Sensors

Justine Billore (1) , Stanislas Hascoët (2) , Rémi Robutel (2) , Cyril Buttay (2) , Jianfeng Li (3)

1 SuperGrid Institute SAS
2 EE - Ampère, Département Energie Electrique
3 Faculty of Engineering [Nottingham]

Silver sintering is used to bond five components together, in order to form a piezoelectric sensor. A description is provided of the preparation of these components, and of the manufacturing steps, which are carried out at a low temperature (280 °C). The resulting sensor assemblies are then characterized: cross-sectional views show that the silver layer has a very dense structure , with less than 1 % porosity, although further focused-ion beam investigations show that this porosity is closer to 15 %. The shear strength is approximately 30 MPa. The Young's modulus of the silver bondline is measured using nanoindentation, and is found to be comparable with that of bulk silver (56.6 GPa). Finally, a silver-sintered sensor is compared with a sensor bonded using conventional techniques, showing that an improvement in sensitivity by a factor of more than 3 is achieved.

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Justine Billore, Stanislas Hascoët, Rémi Robutel, Cyril Buttay, Jianfeng Li. Sintered-Silver Bonding of High-Temperature Piezoelectric Ceramic Sensors. IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technologies, 2016, pp.1-7. ⟨10.1109/TCPMT.2016.2628874⟩. ⟨hal-01419042⟩