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The electronics industry has long dreamed of integrating electronics directly into 3D, highly curvilinear and deformable, using innovative materials whose properties can be functionally tailored in unprecedented ways. Finally, this dream is being realized because the rapid maturity of additive manufacturing and direct-write printing methods has obliterated the boundaries and limitations of traditional manufacturing. Printed electronics are now moving towards fully functional semiconductor-to-system assemblies where all the components of the chip, package and circuits can be 3-D printed. This talk will highlight the efforts that are being made across the world in realizing 3-D printed electronic components (e.g., RF passives like capacitors, inductors, resistors) and their advantages and disadvantages. The remainder of the webinar will be structures into two parts: (ii) fabrication methods; and (ii) reliability of printed electronics.

In the first part, we shall focus on some of our current studies that use 5-axis Aerosol Jet 3D printing (AJP) for fabricating electronic components and assemblies in highly 3D curvilinear form factors. The goal is to be able to produce electronics that can be directly integrated into curvilinear structural members. Examples include: antennae embedded in canopies, 3D display screens, electronics and batteries directly printed into helmets, clothing, foot-ware, medical electronics embedded in substrates that are conformally tailored to human organs, etc. We shall start by discussing the fundamental technology driving the AJP process. After that, we shall present examples of different printed components that we have successfully realized using AJP: fillet-based interconnects for electrically connecting components across different surfaces that are at different vertical elevations, ball grid arrays with polymer interconnects, and solid-core solenoidal inductors. Some of the details that will be discussed, include: (i) detailed material characterization of the different commercially available dielectric and conductive inks, with the latter being quantified in terms of the conductance and the sintering temperature of the printed traces; and (ii) simulation guided efforts to optimize the AJP process, in order to achieve desired print quality.

The second part of this webinar will focus on the reliability aspects of printed electronics under various life-cycle stresses such as temperature, humidity, mechanical (static and dynamic) loads, electrical stresses, combinations of the above and cyclic changes in the above. New failure modes are surfacing due to the different material sets and geometric form factors that are predominantly used in printed electronics and also because of the new additive manufacturing methods and the associated defect structures. The resulting reliability challenges are different from what has been typically encountered in conventional electronic assemblies and the currently available reliability models are therefore no longer directly applicable. This part of the talk will give an overview of the new vulnerabilities of printed electronics and also provide specific examples of reliability investigations currently under way in this research group.

About Presenters:

Prof. Abhijit Dasgupta is a founding member of the Center for Advance Life Cycle Engineering. Prof. Dasgupta's research interests include accelerated product qualification, micromechanics of constitutive and damage behavior, properties of 3-D printed structures, fatigue damage modeling, and self-health monitoring in "smart" systems.

Prof. Siddhartha Das received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2010 in the area of theoretical microfluidics. He Joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Univervisty of Maryland College Park in 2014. He joined the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering in 2018. His research interests span different areas of micro-nanoscale fluid mechanics and interactions of soft matter and complex interfaces with fluid mechanics.