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Abstract

Silver powders play a pivotal role in electronic applications due to their superior conductivity and chemical stability, where morphology and particle size critically determine performance. This work presents a controllable liquid-phase reduction strategy to synthesize spherical silver powders using ascorbic acid as an eco-friendly reductant and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as a morphology-directing agent. Key synthesis parameters, including reactant mixing mode, temperature (30 °C), silver nitrate concentration (0.2 mol/L), PVP dosage (5 wt%), and reducing solution pH (3.3), were systematically optimized to achieve monodisperse spherical particles with an average size of 2 μm. When formulated into sintered conductive pastes with 75 wt% silver loading, the optimized powder enabled exceptional electrical and mechanical performance: a low sheet resistance of 5.3 mΩ/sq and robust adhesion exceeding 20 N. These results demonstrate a scalable route to tailor silver powders for high-performance electronic interconnects in photovoltaic and 5G modules, balancing cost-efficiency with functional reliability.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support provided by Guangdong S&T program (2023B0101200001), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 22461142142, 52372109, 52202133, 52371074, U24A20203), the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2023A1515010373, 2023A1515140060), the Dongguan Innovative Research Team Program (2020607101007), Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province, China (Grant No. 2022CFA031), the Innovation Project of Optics Valley Laboratory (Grant No. OVL2023ZD001), the Dongguan Key Research &Development Program, China (No. 20221200300032), and also acknowledge financial support from the Bualuang ASEAN Chair Professor Research Grant.

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Correspondence to Hua Tan or Haibo Zhang.

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Wang, X., Ma, W., Hu, Y. et al. Engineered Spherical Silver Powders for Low-Resistance Sintered Conductive Pastes. J. Electron. Mater. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-025-12156-3

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  • DOI  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-025-12156-3

Keywords

  • Spherical silver powder
  • liquid-phase reduction
  • morphology control
  • conductive pastes
  • sheet resistance
  • adhesion strength
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