Leveraging Hybrid Electronic Public-Private Partnerships for Future 3D Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing
Eric Forsythe, US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi MD 20783. Electronics are the critical enabler for virtually all aspects of the global economy; integral to the technologies we use, the technologies transporting goods and services, and modern manufacturing tools and fabrication lines used to produce goods or supply services. As the global technology demands for electronics evolve, the development community has been advancing electronics manufacturing processes to meet those demands. In general, the development strategies must account for the full supply chain that delivers end solutions to the technology applications. This supply chain can be outlined simply as; the silicon based chips, electronic packages that assemble one or chip into sub-systems, the printed circuit board assembly of the chips and packages, final system package assembly that connects to the technology application. Underlying each of these elements is a complex supply chain for materials, tools, and electronic design. In the follow technical talk, we will highlight the technical progress towards convergent manufacturing of hybrid electronics as one element of the overall electronics supply chain.
The talk will introduce how public-private partnerships with NextFlex hybrid electronic manufacturing institute and SEMI FlexTech Alliance Strategic Group are leveraged to develop the hybrid electronics supply chains and manufacturing processes. The progress in the manufacturing sciences will be showcased in technology demonstrations of 2-dimonesional hybrid electronics circuits and emerging 3-dimensional electronics. These demonstrations highlight manufacturing processes that include; bare die processing for assembly, thin bare die interconnects for both advanced electronic packages and circuit boards, electronic design tools, and enabling materials suppliers. These enabling manufacturing processes have delivered many unique technology demonstrations that include; human monitoring devices, sensor platforms for manufacturing floors, communications platforms, and human-machine interface technologies.
These manufacturing processes are being extended to 3-dimenstional electronics and integrated structural additive manufacturing providing another degree of design freedom for the system-level applications. Examples will be shown of the 3-D circuits showing complex circuits integrated with 3-axis of integration. Realizing these emerging hybrid electronics demonstrations requires the development of the manufacturing science and the underlying rigorous reliability testing, automated manufacturing process approaches, and understanding of yield requirements towards delivering solutions that ultimately can be defined in an industry standard.
The public-private partnerships, such as the SEMI FlexTech Alliance Strategic Group and Nextflex Manufacturing Innovation Institute provides an ideal framework to collaborate in pre-competitive research and development, define common goals for the supply chain, and deliver technology applications to demonstrate and create technology demand.
