ESTC 2008 – 2nd Electronics System Integration Technology Conference, 1-4 September 2008, The University of Greenwich, London

Citation

Goosey, M. and Cadman, D. (2009), "ESTC 2008 – 2nd Electronics System Integration Technology Conference, 1-4 September 2008, The University of Greenwich, London", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 21 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.2009.21921aac.001

ESTC 2008 – 2nd Electronics System Integration Technology Conference, 1-4 September 2008, The University of Greenwich, London

Article Type: Exhibitions and conferences From: Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Volume 21, Issue 1

At the beginning of September, the University of Greenwich hosted ESTC (2008), an event described as “the foremost Micro and Nanoelectronics, Photonics and MEMS Technology Conference and Exhibition of 2008”. With contributions from 32 countries, 252 papers, 8 poster sessions and 384 delegates, it was not hard to understand why this claim had been made. The event was organised by the Computational Mechanics and Reliability Group of the University of Greenwich and the UK and RI Chapter of IEEE-CPMT Society with additional input from the IEEE and iMAPS Europe and programme sponsorship from the Innovative Electronics Manufacturing Research Centre (IeMRC). ESTC is a Europe-based conference that takes place every two years and which complements its sister conferences ECTC and EPTC in the USA and Singapore, respectively.

The conference itself took place over three days (2-4 September) and was preceded by a full day of short courses covering a wide range of subjects including electrically conductive adhesives, optoelectronic modules and components, silicon vias and microvias, and electrical analysis of electronic packaging. There were also keynote presentations, special invited sessions, early morning and lunchtime workshops and panel discussions adding to the large and varied programme. The strong technical range of the conference papers and courses covered the technical themes of advanced packaging, emerging technologies, healthcare, manufacturing and testing, new materials and processes, modelling and simulation, optoelectronics, reliability and special request topics such as power electronics and assembly of alternative energy sources. A themed technical exhibition with exhibits from 15 organisations complimented the event and provided delegates with the opportunity to discuss more commercial needs.

Figure 1 ESTC 2008 in the Painted Hall at the University of Greenwich

The conference officially commenced with an opening plenary session in the Painted Hall (Figure 1) that was chaired by Professor Chris Bailey of the University of Greenwich (Figure 2). The delegates were welcomed by Professor Tom Barnes who was also from Greenwich. Baroness Theresa Blackstone, the university’s Chancellor gave a speech in which she described the tradition of research at Greenwich and the university’s desire to build a research culture based on innovation and international collaboration. Dr Lewis Terman, CEO of the IEEE then gave a presentation in which he outlined the history of the IEEE and its work in engineering the future. The IEEE’s mission is to foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. It achieves this mission via its 375,000 members in 150 countries and through the 900 conferences that it sponsors across the world. The IEEE was responsible for publishing 30 per cent of the world’s literature in its field. Dr Lewis then described the key challenges for the world in the next 50 years that had been proposed by Nobel Laureate Richard Smiley. These included energy, water, food, the environment, poverty, transport, war, disease, education, democracy and population. After discussing how the electronics industry would help to provide the solutions to some of these challenges, he concluded his presentation by saying that the best gift was “understanding”.

Bill Chen, the Chairman of the IEEE CPMT (Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology) Society, then gave an overview of the size of the electronics industry and the key factors that were influencing the future development of the electronic industry. Global electronic product revenues were currently valued at US$ 1.4 trillion with semiconductors providing US$ 278 billion of the total. Technology was the key driving force and semiconductor devices were now moving from a “More Moore” approach to one described as “More than Moore”. Bill also emphasised the fact that consumers had one of the biggest influences on the development and implementation of new technologies through their buying decisions.

Figure 2 Professor Chris Bailey opening the Conference

There then followed a keynote presentation on Ambient Assisted Living by Dr Nakita Vodjdani, who is head of European Operations and International Relations at the French National Research Agency. Dr Vodjdani used her presentation to describe a new European programme on “Ambient Assisted Living”. This programme has a total value of €700 million and will operate from 2008 to 2013. There will be up to two calls for proposals per year and the aim is to provide ICT solutions to the problems being faced by the ageing European population. The intention is to develop technologies that will enhance the quality of life for older people while simultaneously strengthening the European industrial base. One important area highlighted involves the use of sensors with ambient intelligence and embedded systems in applications such as physiological data monitoring.

Following these opening presentations in the Painted Hall, the full conference programme commenced with up to seven parallel sessions covering a wide range of subject matter. As these sessions were running simultaneously, and because of the large number of papers presented overall, it is not possible to give more than a few examples from some of the sessions in this short review. For those wishing to have access to the full list of presentations and the conference papers, reference should be made to the proceedings that are available from the IEEE[1].

One key theme that ran through the conference and which was the subject of several sessions was “New Materials and Processes”. The first of these sessions was chaired by Johan Liu from Chalmers University in Gothenburg and it covered materials applications. The first paper was by Jaroslaw Kita et al. from the University of Bayreuth in Germany. This paper covered the laser processing of materials for MCM-C applications. The focus was on fine line laser processing and the influence of pulse energy on the cut quality of platinum thick film layers. The processing of unfired material was found to be generally easier and faster than for fired ceramics.

The next paper was on the determination of mechanical properties of small test volumes using nanoindentation and was by Jorgen Villain et al. from the University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg and the Technical University of Berlin. It was described how nanoindentation had grown in popularity due to the development of new equipment. The method was based on the use of Hertz’s elastic solution which was developed in the 1890s and it was used to record indentation depth as a function of load. The technique had been used to characterise lead-free solder alloys that were almost pure tin. In particular, work had focussed on the β tin dendrites that were found in lead-free solders. The hardeness had been found to vary with the orientation of the grains. Future work was planned to study the orientation dependence of creep and stress relaxation in order to enable predictions to be made about the thermo-mechanical behaviour of components.

Johan Liu then presented a paper detailing a compact V-band planar wide bandpass filter based on liquid crystal polymer (LCP) substrates. He began by discussing trends in millimetre-wave electronic packaging and the integration techniques that are being used such as SoC and SoP as well as the key materials which include GaAs and SiGe. LCP substrates offer a number of advantages such as low moisture absorption, high heat resistance and good dimensional stability. However, source treatment/modification is required prior to metallisation. Pattering of conductors has been achieved via conventional lithography using AZ 1512 resist, which was described as a low molecular weight novolac system that is compatible with a persulfate based copper etching approach. Images of such filters working in the 53-70 GHz range were shown and a new method of using a stepped impedance transmission line was described.

The final paper of the session was by Anishi Goswami Mukherjee et al. from Imperial College, London and it covered the die level integration of metal MEMS with CMOS. The use of micromechanics was described as generally requiring a high initial investment and it was something that could be difficult to utilise because of process and material incompatibilities. An approach was described that avoided some of these issues and which was applicable to low-temperature metal MEMS processes. This involved the post-processing of integrated circuit dies that have been implanted in a carrier wafer. This novel approach had been used to fabricate high-Q, self-assembled inductors over 0.18μm CMOS circuits supplied by a commercial foundry.

During the session on “RF Integration and Packaging”, Ruben Perone presented details of his work on RF filter modules with lumped elements in LTCC for applications up to 10 GHz. The main drivers for this research were the need to reduce the dimensions of the modules and their production costs. This could be achieved using LTCC substrates, since they have excellent RF properties and offer multilayer technology at moderate costs. A demonstrator low pass filter with a cut-off at 10 GHz was designed and fabricated using four LTCC layers of the dielectric DP951, with two different thicknesses in order to realise the lumped elements. Both PSpice and field simulations of the filter showed good agreement with measured results, with the measured results indicating 30 dB out of band rejection up to 40 GHz. Future work could include the optimisation of the insertion loss in the pass band. Overall, the work presented demonstrated very well the opportunities for embedded lumped components in LTCC based RF modules.

The poster session for Healthcare, Advanced Packaging and Power Electronics was an excellent opportunity to hear Dierdre Kavanagh of Heriot-Watt University talk about the manufacturing challenges for a novel device designed to separate foetal cells from maternal blood. This was achieved through the maternal blood sample flowing into a microchannel with an applied magnetic field that separated the cells into two microchannels. There is a strong argument for such a device since the current procedures for detecting foetal abnormalities involve extremely invasive procedures (amniocentesis or chronic villus sampling) that increase the risk of miscarriage. During pregnancy foetal cells can be found in small numbers in a maternal blood sample. The design, fabrication and, ultimately, the use of a device that can separate these for analysis would result in a much safer and less stressful procedure for the mother as well as it being less time consuming. Two methods of manufacture of the device were presented; one using the negative photoresist, SU-8, and an alternative using PDMS. Devices using each method were presented with the next phase of work aimed at testing them using bovine and goose blood samples.

Laurent Barreau from ST Microelectronics presented methods of shock evaluation for electronic chip packaging that included the results for a newly proposed package concept called a Molded Grid Array (MGA). The mechanical shocks (shock angles of at 0° and 45° with energies of 0.088 and 0.022 J, respectively) applied to the packages were designed to reproduce those that were observed on a PCB production line. In addition to the MGA package, Quad Flat No-lead (QFN) packages and Wafer Level Chip Scale Packages (WLCSP) were tested for comparison. After the mechanical testing, the chip’s electrical performance was tested. Generally, the QFN packages faired well, being much less sensitive to mechanical shocks than WLCSP (with and without an epoxy cover layer), with the proposed MGA package performing comparably well and presenting opportunities for further investigation of this type of package.

On the final day of the conference during the Optoelectronics session, Kai Wang presented UCL’s work on the IeMRC funded flagship project “Integrated Optical and Electronic Interconnect PCB Manufacturing”. UCL’s contribution to the project focussed on various optical waveguide structures’ transmissions, reflection, loss and cross-alk properties, all at an optical wavelength of 845 nm, and what these would mean for a design layout engineer. Waveguide bends were one structure that have been analysed. These had been produced photolithographically using an acrylate polymer to form multimode waveguides on a FR4 substrate. Parameters investigated include waveguide width, bend radius and the effect of waveguide tapering, with the end result of obtaining optimised bend radii for a given waveguide width. Loss in the waveguides was seen to be at its minimum for a bend of radius ∼15 mm, since there was a trade-off between radiation loss that dominates in bends of radius <20 mm and the higher propagation loss due to the longer lengths required in larger radius bends.

The preceding text has merely given a few examples of the presentations from this large, well attended and highly successful conference. In addition to the formal papers presented, those researchers who had submitted posters were also given the opportunity to formally present their work during the several formal poster sessions. The conference finished as it began with another plenary session in the Painted Hall which included a keynote presentation by Professor Peter Cochrane on “The Challenge of the Non-Linear” during which he asserted that systematic, i.e. linear, approaches were inadequate for the complex technology challenges of the future.

With the large number of delegates attending from all over the world and the wide range of subject matter covered this was, in all ways, a very successful event and one that was enhanced by the excellent venue. The planning and implementation of the conference, and to such a high standard, must have been a massive task for the organisers and they are to be congratulated on the results of their endeavours.

Martin Goosey and Darren CadmanIeMRC – Loughborough University