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METHOD OF MANUFACTURING A
MULTILAYER PRINTED WIRE BOARD
The invention relates to a method of manufacturing a multilayer printed wire board. Such a printed wire board 5 comprises at least three conductive layers, of which usually at least two layers are copper-layers on the outer surfaces and at least one layer is an internal circuit. The method to which the invention pertains comprises bonding by lamination at least one hard base substrate which is provided with conductive traces on both sides and at least one intermediate substrate which comprises a hard core layer provided with an adhesive layer at least at the side facing the conductive traces of the base substrate.
Such a method has been disclosed in IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin Vol 32 No. 5B, pages 355-356, and 15 serves to substantially eliminate the dimensional instability that usually occurs in composite lamination processes. While this can be recognized as a substantial improvement in the manufacture of multilayer boards, the disclosure fails to address an even more important problem associated with 20 multilayer boards, viz. that of providing a material displaying thermal coefficients of expansion (TCE) sufficiently low so as to match the TCE of electronic components (chips) used in conjunction with the multilayer board. A woven glass fabric (cloth) being used as the reinforcement material 25 it is immediately apparent to the person of ordinary skill in the art that the TCEs obtained are relatively high. Further, the prior art substrates and the resulting multilayer boards require improved dimension stability.
Similar considerations apply to U.S. Pat. No. 3,756,891, which discloses a method of manufacturing multilayer 30 PWBs involving the stacking of circuitized boards with adhesive coated sheets. The adhesive is chosen so as not to flow into the through-hole interconnection areas present in the boards.
A different approach towards multilayer PWBs is the 35 sequential laminating technique disclosed in RCA review 29 (1968) pages 582-599, particularly pages 596-597. Although a base-substrate provided with circuitry on both sides is laminated with an adhesive coated dielectric layer, the adhesive coated layer is not an intermediate substrate in 40 between base substrates in accordance with the invention, but serves as a substrate for a next printed circuit. The disclosure does not address the type of substrate used, let alone that it can provide a solution to the problem of providing multilayer boards having sufficiently low TCEs. 45
PWBs providing advantages with respect to TCE have been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,943,334. Described is a manufacturing process which comprises winding reinforcing filaments about a square flat mandrel to form a plurality of layers of filaments intersecting at an angle of 90°, providing the plurality of layers with a curable matrix 50 material, and curing the matrix so as to form a base material for a PWB. In order to provide multilayer PWBs the disclosure teaches a method comprising providing an assembly of PWBs in a cavity, introducing a curable matrix material into the cavity, and curing the matrix so as to form 55 a multilayer PWB. The desired reinforcement of the matrix is obtained by the presence of fibres around the PWBs, which during the process will become embedded in the cured matrix. The method fails to provide acceptable suitable results due to, inter alia, an internal lack of thickness- 60 tolerance.
In C. J. Coombs, jr.'s Printed Circuits Handbook, published by McGraw-Hill, chapters 31 and 32, more particularly 33 and 34, it is described, int. al., how a multiple layer printed wire board, a so-called multilayer, is generally 65 manufactured, the process being comprised of the following steps:
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manufacturing a laminate coated on both sides with copper foil from glass fabric-epoxy prepreg;
etching the desired pattern into the copper;
bonding the etched laminates by pressing them together with intermediate layers of glass fibre-epoxy prepreg.
There are a number of drawbacks to this process, such as high materials costs on account of glass fabric being employed and high thermal expansion on account of the low maximum fibre content in fibre-reinforced laminates. Another major drawback to this process is that there is no absolute thickness tolerance. The thickness of a multilayer formed in this manner is dependent on, int. al., the moulding pressure exerted, the moulding temperature and the warming-up rate employed, and the "age" of the used prepreg and some other factors which are hard to control.
There are several variations from the latter process, e.g., as disclosed in EP 0 231 737 A2. In this known process a multilayer printed wire board is manufactured in a continuous process. In the embodiment according to FIG. 2 of this publication use is made of a single printed wire board (PWB) comprised of a substrate of two layers of glass cloth in a cured matrix of thermosetting synthetic material, which substrate is provided on both sides with a layer of copper traces formed by the subtractive method from the copper foil originally applied to the substrate. To this initial PWB there are applied, on both sides, two layers of glass cloth, a layer of liquid thermosetting material, such as epoxy resin, and a copper foil. After preheating the whole is laminated in a double belt press under the effect of heat and pressure. Thus, after cooling as it leaves the double belt press, a laminate is obtained which after the forming of copper traces in the outer layers makes a multilayer PWB. Hence this multilayer PWB is made up of a laminate of three substrates of glass cloth-reinforced cured epoxy resin and four layers with copper traces.
Although quite reasonable results can be obtained using the multilayer PWB manufactured according to this known process, it still has certain drawbacks. Notably, the layers of liquid, not yet cured thermosetting resin are greatly pressed together in the double belt press, as a result of which there is a substantial decrease of the laminate's thickness between the double belt press's inlet and its outlet. It has been found that as a result of this major change in thickness it is hard to maintain with sufficient accuracy the constant thickness of the finished laminate and of the finished multilayer PWB as ultimately desired. Deviations in a PWB's thickness have an unfavourable effect on its electrical properties, thus negatively affecting the quality of such a PWB. Another drawback to said known multilayer PWB is that reinforcing the substrates with fabrics is a comparatively costly affair.
DE-4 007 558 Al describes a multilayer PWB of a somewhat different type. Between a number of adjacent single PWBs (cf. FIG. 1, no. 2 of DE-4 007 558 Al) which are each composed of a substrate (cf. FIG. 1, no. 4) made up of a glass cloth impregnated with a thermosetting synthetic material and provided on both sides with copper traces (cf. FIG. 1, no. 5), there is interposed in each case a sort of intermediate substrate (FIG. 1, nos. 1-a and 1-b). The intermediate substrate (1) consists in this case of a polyimide film (1-a) of a thickness of 10 urn which is provided on both sides with an adhesive layer (1-b) of a thickness of 10 um or less. The melting temperature of the polyimide film is higher than the temperature used during lamination, while the adhesive layers have a melting temperature below the used lamination temperature.
A disadvantage of said known multilayer PWB consists in that there is air in the voids between the copper traces (cf.
