With the phasing out of lead-bearing solders, electrically conductive adhesives (ECAs) have been identified as one of the environmentally friendly alternatives to tin/lead (Sn/Pb) solders in electronics packaging applications. In particular, with the requirements for fine-pitch and high-performance interconnects in advanced packaging, nanoconductive adhesives are becoming more and more importan...

JOHNS HOPKINS APL T E lectronic packaging has played a major role in the success of systems developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. This article briefly chronicles some selected and often unique examples of APL’s electronic packages over its 56-year history. The early APL electronic packages were needed for the famous VT fuze of World War II; in that case, four vacuum tubes and the ancilla...

Optical MEMS subsystems are complex compositions of varied components that can include optical fibers, freespace and guided wave optics, drive electronics, control systems, MEMS chips, and packaging. Good engineering practice requires that each of these components be designed with the system application in mind. In general, there are two approaches to the design of complex integrated systems. T...

With their extremely low mass and volume, low power consumption and tight integration with electronics, MEMS (microsystems) sensors and actuators are extremely appealing for reducing the size and mass of spacecraft without sacrificing functionality. In view of the harsh and remote environment of space, reliability and qualification is the crucial issues that are holding back MEMS from playing a...

Testing of interconnects on a printed circuit board has been studied and the procedure has been standardized in the IEEE 1149.1 (JTAG) standard. The Sysem-on-Chip (SOC) technology allows us to integrate on the same chip, most of the electronics on a PCB. However, since an SOC operates at a much higher speed and has a very large packaging density, testing its interconnects is different. For exam...

Emerging self powered systems challenge and dictate the direction of research in energy harvesting (EH). State of the art in energy harvesting is being applied in various fields using different single energy sources or a combination of two or more sources. In certain applications like smart packaging, radio frequency (RF) is the preferred method to power the electronics while for smart building...

Founded in 1991, Digital Optics Corporation began as a micro-optics developer and is now a leading supplier of diffractive and micro-optical components. In the late 1990s, Digital Optics recognized that the labor-intensive integration and packaging of its components in the optoelectronic industry was driving customer costs higher and was leading manufacturers to seek inexpensive, overseas labor...

In today’s era the demand of Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit (VLSI) is increase due to the growth of the Electronics industry. VLSI has high performance and high functionality at minimum cost and power dissipation. Continuously scaling of VLSI circuits is reducing gate delays but rapidly increasing interconnects delays. The higher power consummation is due to long wiring networks and clock ...

A flexible technology is proposed to integrate smart electronics and microfluidics all embedded in an elastomer package. The microfluidic channels are used to deliver both liquid samples and liquid metals to the integrated circuits (ICs). The liquidmetals are used to realize electrical interconnects to the IC chip. This avoids the traditional IC packaging challenges, such as wire-bonding and fl...

In high power electronics packaging, sintered silver nanoparticle joints suffer from thermal-humidity- electrical-chemical joint driven corrosion in extreme environments. this paper, we conducted aging tests on nanoparticles under high-temperature, high-humidity, and high-sulphur conditions. The results show that: (1) the sample dry conditions at a temperature exhibited highest degree of sulphi...