“Laser Powder Bed Fusion of Titanium Alloyed Copper Powder for Power Electronic Substrates” Receives Excellent Paper Award at ISSE 2024

At the 47th International Spring Seminar on Electronics Technology (ISSE 2024) in Prague, the paper “Laser Powder Bed Fusion of Titanium Alloyed Copper Powder for Power Electronic Substrates” by Christoph Hecht, Mario Sprenger, and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörg Franke from FAU Solar was awarded the “Excellent Paper Award For Young Scientists”.

The paper presents the use of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) based on the industrially established active metal brazing (AMB) for the metallization of alumina to produce metal-ceramic composites. While AMB uses silver- or copper-based active brazing alloys to join electrically and thermally highly conductive copper foils to chemically stable ceramic substrates, LPBF can be used to print three-dimensional copper metallizations onto the ceramic, enabling advanced solutions for thermal management in power modules. The investigations show that the use of titanium-alloyed copper powder can form a reaction layer as a result of the laser process, which is a fundamental prerequisite for wetting the ceramic. In order to realize a stable bond and additionally power-electronically loadable structures, a multi-material approach is also presented, which shows metallizations made of pure copper on a bonding layer made of copper-titanium.