Design of experiment evaluation of sputtered thin film platinum surface metallization on alumina substrate for implantable conductive structures.

Reliability and reproducibility of implants and their fabrication are highly depending on the assembly and packaging procedures. Individual fabrication skills like soldering introduce inaccuracies and should be avoided as much as possible. Screen printing is often utilized for the metallization of ceramics. Using platinum/gold (Pt/Au) paste liquidus diffusion leads to a low adhesion strength of the Pt/Au pads after soldering. As an alternative, sputtering of thin film surface metallization was investigated. However, this alternative comes with a huge amount of different layer and parameter setups. In order to keep the amount of experiments and data acquisition in a reasonable magnitude, the Design of Experiment (DoE) evaluation displays a powerful tool. We found an optimal layer setup that maximizes the adhesion strength of the layer, while simultaneously minimizing the sheet resistance and removing the dependency of soldering time.