Synthesis and dispersion control of Sn based metal nanoparticles

Abstract

Nowadays, printing circuit board which is vital and inevitable at the electronic industry is manufactured by lithography technology which has some disadvantages such as using corrosive etchant, having expensive process, and consuming time. Moreover, lithography technology is hard to apply at flexible substrate which can apply to the flexible electronics. One of the promising technology is the ink-jet printing technology which can make the conductive line directly on the substrate. For using the ink-jet printing technology, electronic ink which contains metals is necessary, and metal nanoparticles are promising material for applying electronic ink. For decreasing process temperature and preventing print nozzle clogging, synthesized metal nanoparticles must has nanosize and high dispersity in solvent. Here, We synthesize monodisperse Sn-Cu nanoparticles which have relatively high conductivity and low melting point. Monodisperse Sn-Cu nanoparticles are synthesized by sodium borohydride reduction method using polyols as a solvent and poly vinyl pyrrolidone as a surfactant. Synthesized Sn-Cu nanoparticles show that the melting point is dramatically decrease, when nanoparticles dimension fall into 15~10nm. Moreover, we try to increase scale of nanoparticles for industrial application. Using large scale method, synthesized Sn-Cu nanoparticles show the bimodality, which can be easily applicable to electronic ink.