This paper describes an Electronics Manufacturing curriculum development project at Penn State. This pilot project is intended to enhance the design and practical experiences of undergraduate engineering students by combining the resources of the Electrical Engineering Department, the Industrial and Manufircturing Engineering Department, and the Center fbr Electronic Design, Communications, and...

Lasers continue to gain ground in materials processing applications for microelectronics manufacturing. Printed circuit boards, IC wafers, substrates for blue/green LEDs, and various components in flat panel displays are all being processed with lasers. Some of these operations, such as microvia drilling in high-density circuit boards, are well established; others are under evaluation or in ear...

Diffusion of boron in silicon has great technological relevance to microelectronic processing. Despite considerable effort spanning over many years, the dominant mechanism for this diffusion remains strongly debated, together with the values of key activation energies. Some evidence indicates that the principal mobile species is a B-Si complex (so-called “pair diffusion”), whereas other evidenc...

First observed in gaseous plasmas in the early 1960’s, helicon discharges lay like a sleeping giant until they emerged in the 1980’s, when their usefulness as efficient plasma sources for processing microelectronic circuits for the burgeoning semiconductor industry became recognized. Research on helicons spread to many countries; new, challenging, unexpected problems arose, and these have spawn...

As continued progress towards faster, low power consuming microelectronic devices becomes increasing difficult due to the scaling challenges of electrical interconnects, it becomes even more critical to explore alternative technologies. Tunable porous silicon photonic bandgap structures are viable building blocks for optical interconnects, which present a possible long term solution to the inte...

Self-assembly in microand nanofluidic devices has been the focus of much attention in recent years. This is not only due to their advantages of self-assembling with fine temporal and spatial control in addition to continuous processing that is not easily accessible in conventional batch procedures, but they have evolved to become indispensable tools to localize and assimilate microand nanocompo...

— We are working towards the speci cation and design of a new system-level architecture serving as the digital control/processing core of ultra-low-power (< 100 μW ) and reliable systems along with a suitable, new compiler. Our primary area of focus is implantable microelectronic devices. While respecting the traditional design constraints of biomedical-implant design for low power consumption ...

Over the past decade, big data analysis has seen an exponential growth and will certainly continue to witness spectacular developments due to the emergence of new interactive multimedia applications and highly integrated systems driven by the rapid growth in information services and microelectronic devices. So far, most of the current mobile systems are mainly targeted to voice communications w...

Single Event Effects (SEEs), disruptions in a microelectronic device caused by the passage of an energetic particle through the sensitive region of the device, are an increasing problem with advances in technologies. Three technology trends are responsible for the increased number of SEEs over the last decade. First, with the reduction of the operating voltages, devices have are susceptible to ...