Abstract
It was demonstrated that continuous copper films could be grown onto printed lines of nanosized silver colloids. These silver colloids, with an average size of ∼55 nm, were printed on alumina substrates by either an ink-jet printer or a felt-tip pen and then served as a seed layer for subsequent electroless copper plating. A complete copper film could be obtained in less than 10 min when the surface density of silver particles was greater than 1.5× 109 cm-2 and an appropriate plating solution to produce a mean copper growth rate of 7.2 μm h-1. After 30 min of growth and a resulting film thickness of ∼3.6 μm, the measured electric resistivity of the lines was about 1.8× 10-6 cm, being very close to bulk copper. In addition, the measured peel adhesion strength between the deposited copper film and the Al2 O3 substrate was larger than 6 kgcm. © 2007 The Electrochemical Society.