An Additive Production approach for Microvias and Multilayered polymer substrate patterning of 2.5μm feature sizes

Consumer electronics market is escalating towards the miniaturization and the use of HDI-PCBs is dominating. Thus, the production technologies are adapting the Semi-Additive process (SAP) or modified-SAP (mSAP) methods over conventional subtractive print-and-etch methods. Most of the Smartphone manufacturers are using Substrate-like PCB (SLP) with mSAP techniques to scale down the Lines and Spaces (L&S) on PCBs equivalent to ICs. However, those processes still involve subtractive patterning in the intermediate stages of fabrication. In this paper, a fully additive multi-layer patterning process using an electroless copper plating has been investigated. This patterning process is based on modifying a polymer surface by activating a seed layer of grafting polymer chains on it using optimized UV-Laser parameters. This surface modification enables a strong bonding of Copper (Cu) onto the modified surface by Cu-plating. Using a micrometer via laser ablation and subsequent sub-micrometer laser lithography a 2.5D surface pattern has been achieved with the proposed technique.So far, using the proposed additive production process the feature sizes of 2.5 μm L&S and via of diameter 10 μm have been achieved.The via ablation and pattering were done by using 266nm and 375nm laser sources respectively.The substrates used are standard FR4 material and a layer of polyurethane of thickness 35μm coated on top of it. Analysis of the process parameters and their optimization has been done by factorial design method using Design Expert 12.0 software to show their contribution and significance in the production process.