development of nano metal powders for ultra-low fire mlc inner electrodes发展纳米金属粉末的超低火多层陶瓷内部电极.pdfVIP

Active and Passive Elec. Comp. , 2002, Vol. 25, pp. 181–189 DEVELOPMENT OF NANO METAL POWDERS FOR ULTRA-LOW FIRE MLC INNER ELECTRODES* { FERNANDO DE LA VEGA , EYNAT MATZNER, ERIK KHASIN, AHARON NAOR and ASAF GREENSHPAN NanoPowders Industries, 7 Bareket St., Caesaria Industrial Park 38900, Israel (Received December 2001) The need to reduce metal content, especially Palladium content in the multi layer ceramic components is driven by two motives. The first is the need to reduce material costs which has become a major issue due to the sharp rise and instability of palladium price. The second motive is the need to build components with ever-growing number of layers, in order to achieve better performance. In this paper, a series of new metal powders, which were developed by NanoPowders Industries (NPI), will be discussed. These powders vary in composition, from pure silver, to silver–palladium, silver–platinum and silver– gold alloys. These powders are of very fine particle size. They open a broad working window for MLC design. The different properties of the powders will be discussed in this paper, including melting and sintering behavior. Keywords : Metal powders, MLC inner electrodes, nano powders, silver-palladium powders, capacitor inner electrodes. INTRODUCTION In the last 4 years, prices of palladium reached new heights and were generally unstable and hard to predict (see Fig. 1). The result was high pressure on components producers to find cheaper and more stable alternatives. Moving to base metals electrodes was one strategy taken by many producers. At the same time a move to low fire systems started. The idea in ‘‘low fire’’ systems is to develop dielectric and metal powders (mainly metal alloys of s