The Impact of Hydrogen Gas Evolution on Blister Formation in Electroless Copper Films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Electroless copper plating is a key process to provide electrically conductive layers on insulating substrates for the subsequent copper electroplating of printed circuit boards (PCBs). Recently introduced substrate materials are prone to spontaneous delamination failure (blistering) of the electroless layer during deposi-tion. A higher nickel content in electroless copper baths prevents delamination failure by increasing the internal tensile stress in the copper layer. This effect is achieved by suppressing copper self-diffusion through the incorporation of small amounts of nickel in the grain boundaries and the grain boundary junc-tions. Whether the hydrogen gas that evolves inevitably during electroless copper deposition, and that is potentially trapped in the deposit may cause blistering is still under debate. Here we test this hypothesis by quantifying the generated hydrogen gas volume during copper deposition in baths with nickel concentra-tions between 0 and 1000 ppm, and observing the rate of blister formation in the deposit. We find a con-stant molar ratio of 0.65±0.05 mol H2/mol Cu independent of the nickel content in the bath, in contrast to a systematic and substantial change of the blister probability. From this lack of a correlation between the blister rate and hydrogen evolution, we rule out hydrogen evolution as a determining factor for blister for-mation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".