This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project addresses the low volume manufacturing of test probe cards through Electrochemical Printing. Integrated Circuit Board Testing Connectors(ICBTCs) include contactors that are metal structures designed to contact integrated circuit boards (ICBs) at the wafer level during production with wafer probe cards (WPCs) or after packaging with package testing sockets (PTSs). WPC contactors are manufactured with semiconductor processes (SPs) in high volume whereas PTS contactors are built in lower volume with conventional microfabrication (CM) or low cost plating through dryfilm masks on flexible substrates. There is increasing pressure to reduce the ICB package size and PTS contactor dimensions while also reducing testing costs. This project addresses these needs by developing a moderate cost, high resolution electrochemical printing technology.
The broader impacts of this research include providing repair solutions for high value products that are currently thrown away and reducing plating bath inventory in an electrodeposition tool by at least 10X. The long term opportunity is for EcP is to revolutionize desktop microfabrication because it is a low cost, single step process that has promise of producing complex 3D fully functional polymer, semi-conductor, and metal parts.
Rapid manufacturing or CNC tools have reduced production costs for small part quantities by significantly reducing the up-front set-up costs. Some of these tools easily make metal parts with length scales above 0.100 mm but most are limited in their ability to scale down below about 20 microns (2x10-5 m). Semiconductor processes use a series of photolithography, deposition, and etching steps to pattern silicon wafers and can easily build features smaller than 1 micron. These processes are well-suited for mass production but become expensive or even cost-prohibitive for small part quantities because they have large up-front engineering costs and expensive capital equipment. Due to these limitations, a market opportunity exists for rapid manufacturing tools capable of making small quantities of dense metal parts at length scales well below 1 mm. Our recent NSF Phase II SBIR project focused on commercializing a recently invented direct write micro-plating (DWP) tool capable of addressing the load board (LB) market. Our DWP tool is similar to other rapid manufacturing tools because metal patterns can be deposited from software drawings. Figure 1 shows sample patterns and materials fabricated with our direct write plating process. DWP offers product engineers the capability of depositing a variety of metals and alloys on several substrates and substrate geometries. Depending on the specific application, DWP can reduce costs, increase performance, or reduce turn-around times. The most significant result of this work is the increased functionality of the Ionographics DWP tool. These efforts have generated our first revenue for depositing hard gold on the contact pads of specialty printed circuit boards, or device under test (DUT) load boards (LBs) used for testing microchips. DUT LBs can cost up to $20K and we estimate the total worldwide market is $400 Million/yr. As a result of our work, we have generated $10K of revenue processing DUT LBs and improved processing times from 1-2 LB pads/min to 3-4 pads/min through improved tool automation and functionality. The second most significant outcome of this research is the increased IP related to recipes for depositing copper, nickel, gold, and rhodium with different nozzle sizes and their resulting material properties. We have also generated revenue from re-plating LB pads thereby increasing the lifetime of a valuable part. Figure 2 shows example re-plated LB pads. The long term vision of direct write plating is to fabricate 3D components similar to the multi-material cantilever described in Figure 3. The cantilever portion was fabricated by first depositing a base of copper and sacrificial material next to each other. Then a line of copper and then nickel was deposited over each. A gold bump was deposited at the tip of the cantilever and then the sacrificial material beneath the cantilever was removed. This phase II NSF SBIR has created two full time research engineering jobs and 1.25 sales, marketing, and administrative positions. Our DUT LB customer was sending boards overseas to be processed and we have kept this work in the US because we can turn around jobs faster and with higher quality than their overseas alternative. We can further reduce waste by extending the lifetime of high value DUT LBs by re-plating the worn out pads. Now that revenue has been generated from the LB market, we are expanding our sales and marketing efforts to find new applications within the medical device, micromachining, printed electronic, and flex circuit industries. We found the name Ionographics did not resonate with customers so we have adopted the trade name "MicraMetal".
