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New Geometries Drive Search for Flexible Manufacturing
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
This article discusses the benefits of a new microelectronics fabrication technology, and explores some of its application areas.
By David Ramahi
Feature sizes in electronics assembly and packaging continue to decrease. Traces, spacings, bond pads and other geometries are a tenth the size they were a decade ago. Additionally, increasing production volumes must accommodate more frequent change orders, shorter marketing windows and materials flexibility. Demand is growing for faster, finer, more flexible and less expensive materials deposition solutions.
In thick film processes, stencil printing applies paste or ink patterns to a substrate. Thick film is simple and relatively inexpensive, but ineffective in producing lines and spaces below 100 µm.
Thin film processes, such as sputtering and chemical vapor deposition, can produce complex devices with submicron features using masks and photoresists, but it is complicated and costly.
However, a new technology can effectively address feature sizes between 1 and 100 µm — Maskless Mesoscale Materials Deposition (M3D). M3D is a fine-feature additive manufacturing process that produces a wide range of microelectronic structures directly from CAD data.
Without masks or resists, M3D technology generates high-resolution patterns of electronic materials on both high- and low-temperature substrates for high-density interconnects, flexible circuits, discrete components and multilayered devices with feature sizes to 25 µm and below. M3D also can produce electronic features below 10 µm with additional laser treatment.
Process benefits include:
- CAD-based: Virtual Masking software automatically generates tool paths from standard CAD data formats.
- Flexibility: deposits materials such as metals, conductors, polymers and adhesives on virtually any surface material.
- Low Temperature: accommodates a variety of substrates that have low temperature tolerances, including plastics. This results in a high-quality thin film with excellent adhesion.
- Conformal: deposits materials precisely on nonplanar substrates, made possible by the deposition head's standoff point.
- Environmental: eliminates waste associated with traditional subtractive processes.
M3D can be used for many microelectronics applications, such as the custom production of flexible circuits, the manufacturing of high-conductivity backplanes for flat-panel displays, the fabrication of fine-feature microsensors, and the integration of high-precision components.
Figure. Silver metal deposited over a 625 µm step with M3D technology.
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Application areas include:
- Product Development: cost-effectively generates circuitry and components directly from CAD data.
- Packaging/HDI: produces ultra-fine feature circuitry, making it ideal for next-generation packaging and high-density interconnect (HDI) applications. Other opportunities include via filling, system-on-a-chip, embedded passive devices (EPD) and chip scale packaging (CSP).
- Component Production: creates complex geometries from a range of materials.
- Device Manufacture: deposits conductive, insulating and adhesive materials layer by layer within a single system for partial or complete production of microelectronics devices.
- MEMS: deposits novel materials and geometries, including the production of multilayer and 3-D structures, making it a candidate for MEMS applications that require mesoscale depositions.
Conclusion
For electronics assembly and semiconductor packaging, manufacturing process changes are inevitable, driven by customer requirements and unrelenting pressure to fit more processing power into less space. M3D technology is a promising solution that addresses the requirements of many next-generation microelectronics products.
David Ramahi, president and CEO, can be reached at Optomec Inc., 3911 Singer N.E., Albuquerque, NM 87109; (505) 761-8250; Fax: (505) 761-6638; E-mail: dramahi@optomec.com.