Multi-physics models and condition-based monitoring for 3D-Printing of electronic packages

Abstract

3D-Printing technology, or additive manufacturing, is seeing increased interest in the electronic packaging community as it has the potential to enable cost-effective, potentially high-throughput and high degree of design customisation. At the same time there are a number of challenges related to quality, performance and reliability of the fabricated products. Technological advances and other capabilities to address successfully these challenges are required and need to be developed. This include the development of process models that can be used to predict characteristics of products manufactured with 3D printing techniques. This paper gives an overview of the current state of 3D printing in the context of technology use for electronics packaging. It details in particular the developments made in the modelling for 3D ink-jet printing of packaged electronic components which is taking place in the EU funded project NextFactory (http://www.nextfactory-project.eu). This project is developing an all-in-one manufacturing platform that integrates 3D-printing (multi-material ink-jet), material cure and sintering and micro-assembly technologies for electronic packaging applications. Particular areas of novelty in the presented work relate to: (1) development of Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics solver for ink-jet droplet deposition and coalescence, (2) development of finite element models for predicting deformation and residual stress due to cure shrinkage as each layer is deposited, and (3) development of machine-learning and surrogate modelling based framework for condition-based monitoring of the fabrication process.