Every year I like to present the Chemistree! Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes for a Prosperous New Year! The post Seasons Greetings and Happy Holidays appeared first on Polymer Innovation Blog ..read more

Guest post by Jeremy Pasatta, Advanced Polymer Coatings Previous blog posts on toughening have looked at the need for tougheners in thermosets, the two main toughening technologies, RLP and coreshell particles, along with methods of how to measure toughness and typical increases in toughness with RLP and coreshell particles.  In this blog post we will look at another form of toughening technology, block copolymers. Block copolymers contain long segments of one type of monomer, and can have two or more of these segments, where segments are on the molecular weight order of a few thousand Da ..read more

Guest post by Jeremy Pasatta, Advanced Polymer Coatings Now that we have looked at the theory of toughening thermosets with second phase tougheners along with the two most common tougheners (RLP and coreshell particles) let’s look at how we measure the toughness of thermosets.  There are several different methods to measure the toughness of thermosets, and the method that is chosen often depends on the type of thermoset, the application, and exactly how the thermoset is being used withing the application.  Table 1 gives an overview of the different ways of measuring thermoset toughne ..read more

Guest post by Jeremy Pasatta, Advanced Polymer Coatings The previous two blog posts have looked at both the fundamentals of toughening thermosets as well as one of the most common technologies used to toughen thermosets – Reactive Liquid Polymers and CTBN.  In this blog post, we’ll look at toughening thermosets with coreshell particles. Coreshell particles are exactly as the name implies, particles that contain a low modulus, low Tg core that is incompatible with the matrix resin, and to solubilize the particles within thermoset, a thin shell that is matrix compatible is placed on the out ..read more

Join me at the IMAPS International Symposium on Microelectronics in October. I will be presenting a Professional Development Course on: Polymers for Wafer Level Packaging Monday, October 2 at 10:30 AM. Course Description The course has been completely updated to include a detailed discussion of the polymers and polymer-related processing for Fan-Out Wafer Level (FOWLP) packaging as well as Fan-Out Panel Level packaging (FOPLP). The course will provide an overview of the important structure-property-process-performance relationships for polymers used in wafer level packaging.  The main le ..read more

Guest post by Jeremy Pasatta, Advanced Polymer Coatings In the previous blog post, we explored the reasons why thermosets benefit from the addition of second phase tougheners.  One of the most successful and widely used forms of second phase tougheners is Reactive Liquid Polymers, or RLP.  RLP can be any polymer that is low enough in molecular weight to be able to flow at room temperature, and they also have sites capable of reacting with the matrix resin.  Initially, these polymers are compatible with the matrix resin and form a one phase homogeneous system.  As the curing ..read more

Guest post by Jeremy Pasatta, Advanced Polymer Coatings Thermosets such as epoxies, vinyl esters, cyanate esters, and benzoxazines give excellent properties such as chemical and thermal resistance, dimensional stability, high modulus and good adhesion to a variety of substrates.  These properties are in part due to the crosslink density of the thermoset, where in general the higher the crosslink density, the higher the stated attributes of the thermoset.  Unfortunately, higher crosslink density also makes thermosets extremely brittle, making them prone to premature fracture and failu ..read more

This is the final post in this series on high performance thermosetting polymers.  This post discussed the use of specialized cyanate esters for high performance electronic packaging applications. Dicyanate resins are versatile thermosets and have been used in a wide variety of applications. For example, RTX-366 (Hunstman Chemical), shown in Figure 1, is a high molecular weight meta substituted cyanate ester oligomer with excellent dielectric properties (low dielectric constant and loss factor) along with low moisture absorption [1,2]. RTX 366 has been used in low outgassing and dimension ..read more

The previous post covered an introduction to cyanate ester thermosetting resins. This post will discuss the main applications of cyanate ester thermosets.  In the 1980’s the main applications for cyanate esters were in electronic applications. Specifically, cyanate esters were used in high performance circuit boards and semiconductor substrates.  The substrate technical drivers are: Lower coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), specifically low z-axis expansion Low dielectric constant (Dk < 4) and low dissipation factor (Df< 0.01) over a wide frequency band Adhesion to low Dk ..read more

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