High temperature migration of thick film conductor

Abstract

When burn-in testing was performed at high temperature with opposing electrodes which were formed on the thick film Ag conductor, a short occurred between the electrodes. We realized that this was due to the electric field strength in addition to the temperature. Moreover, we found the cause of this short from the results of our investigation: in the conductor firing process, Ag is melted with glass inside the conductor and this mixture of Ag and glass disperses and accumulates near the electrode. For this reason, we improved the glass quality inside the conductor to decrease the degree of dispersion of the Ag/glass mixture during firing of the conductor and avoided high temperature migration.