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2008
Conference Paper
Titel
FluidAssem - a new method of fluidic-based assembly with surface tension
Abstract
Regarding electronic components the reduction of costs will be a challenging goal in the next years. The use of polymer electronics will not help to solve this problem. Cheap products made of silicon are here to stay for a while. The latest roadmap of the VDI/VDE-IT (see MINAM-Roadmap: www.micromanufacturing.eu) indicate that the size of assembled silicon chips must dramatically be reduced. The size of these chips will be less than 500 µm x 500 µm and will have a thickness lower than 50 to 70 µm. The reduction of the silicon material must be in parallel to the reduction of the costs for the manufacturing process. An indicator for this trend is also shown in Figure 1. For example the expected world market share for RFID in 2010 will be about 11.7 billion USD (Frost & Sullivan 2004). This can only happen if the overall costs (microchip and manufacturing) decrease. The conventional manufacturing methods for microchips with conventional die-bonders have also reached their limit concerning accuracy of positioning, throughput and handling of smallest microchips and micro components. The expected requirements effected by downscaling makes it necessary to invent new innovative technologies for production like FluidAssem. The main topic in the next few years will be the development of processes which have the capability to use self assembly methods ([3], [10], [6]). The presented paper investigates methods for processes allowing self assembly of microchips. Additionally the vision is traced to establish an assembly process without using pick and place methods as used in die-bonder processes today. A new concept FluidAssem was developed to establish methods for reaching this challenging goal of a safe assembly process for the future.
Author(s)