Stereolithographic additive manufacturing diamond/SiC composites with high thermal conductivity for electronic 3D-packaging applications

Diamond/SiC composites with high thermal conductivity are important materials for electronic industry, especially electronic packaging, but their complex structures and high-precision manufacturing are still challenging issues. Stereolithography-based manufacturing method combined with the reactive melt infiltration to make diamond/SiC composites with high-precision complex structures has been proposed in this paper. Diamond particles were used as the raw material, and as the particle size is a key factor affecting composite performance its influence was studied by means of measuring parameters, examining microstructure, and detecting components, whereas related mechanisms are discussed as necessary. Subsequently, a diamond/SiC composite with the thermal conductivity of 245.68 W/(m K) has been prepared and used in experiment. The experiment shows that the precision is affected by light-scattering and bending in the printing plane and in the vertical plane respectively, with the size errors of 0.25 and 0.12 mm.