ABSTRACT
Adhesion between dissimilar materials is of utmost importance for electronic packaging applications. In many applications, adhesion between flexible poly mers and rigid substrates is of particular concern. Consequently, there is a need for techniques that evaluate the quality of the polymer/rigid substrate interface be fore and after environmental aging (immersed in 70°C DI water). While there are many adhesion tests to choose from [1,2,3], only a few fulfill the required criteria. The appropriate adhesion test must be quantitative, repeatable, quick and straight forward requiring little or no sample preparation. The technique should be readily combined with environmental aging. Finally, the strain energy release rate of the interface should readily be derived from the practical adhesion measurements. The blade adhesion test fulfills these requirements and is particularly well suited for measuring the practical adhesion [1,2,3] of soft films on hard substrates. The blade adhesion test consists of moving a blade of a specified geometry and orien tation parallel to the interface while simultaneously imposing a constant normal
force and measuring the tangential force exerted on the blade. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the blade adhesion test for polyimide films onto rigid sub strates. The effect of polyimide thickness, substrate composition and environ mental aging were considered. A finite element model was developed to derive the strain energy release rate from the measured blade removal forces.
