Nanoparticles sintering technology for power electronics modules and beyond

IN advancing the ’More thanMoore’ paradigm, heterogeneous integration has emerged to facilitate the creation of highly efficient, compact, and multi-functional semiconductor systems. Addressing the challenges related to power efficiency, superior performance, and integration density, low-temperature nanoparticle sintering technology has become...

Analog front-end and algorithm co-design for efficient biosignal acquisition: And its application to cardiac signal monitoring

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) claimed 17.9 million lives annually (2019), representing 32% of total deaths, with 85% attributed to heart attacks and strokes worldwide. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most frequent type of cardiac arrhythmia that has a worldwide prevalence of 46 million individuals worldwide. The absence of P-waves in the...

Understand the Physics of Solder Joint Degradation in Board Level Reliability Vibration and Thermal Cycle Test

Board-level reliability (BLR) looks at the reliability problem in the package and PCB interconnection, which is an important topic in microelectronics. The current criterion in the BLR test is to look if the connection is open, which can only detect the failure and there is no available method that can detect the degradation of the solder joints...

A Level Shifter With Almost Full Immunity to Positive dv/dt for Buck Converters

High-frequency buck converters need a fast transition of switching nodes (high dv/dt). Such high dv/dt, especially the positive one, can cause malfunction of a conventional pulse-triggered active-coupled (PTAC) level shifter that is used to control the high-side NMOS switch. In this work, we first discuss the dv/dt immunity of conventional PTAC...

A Low-Spur Fractional-N PLL Based on a Time-Mode Arithmetic Unit

This article introduces a low-jitter low-spur fractional-N phase-locked loop (PLL) adopting a new concept of a time-mode arithmetic unit (TAU) for phase error extraction. The TAU is a time-signal processor that calculates the weighted sum of input time offsets. It processes two inputs - the period of a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO)...

Elucidating the large variation in ion diffusivity of microelectronic packaging materials

The risk of corrosion poses a challenge to meet the stringent reliability requirements of microelectronic devices that are used in harsh environments. Microelectronic devices are often encapsulated in polymer packaging materials, which protect them from corrosion. These polymers are, however, not completely hermetic and thus allow small...

Through Package Via: A bottom-up approach

The rapid development of semiconductor industry in the past decades has reshaped the world tremendously and greatly changed people's lives. Two-dimensional (2D) down-sizing of semiconductor devices following the “Moore's law” for many years is now reaching its boundary conditions of further exponential growth and three-dimensional (3D)...

Design and fabrication of a measurement interface for smart IoT sensors: Signal generation and hardware control

This project is to design and implement a reconfigurable measurement interface for Internet of Things sensors, for the Microelectronics Department of the Delft University of Technology. This thesis will discuss the functionality and design process taken in designing such a reconfigurable measurement interface, focusing on generating signals and...

Very low temperature epitaxy of group-IV semiconductors for use in FinFET, stacked nanowires and monolithic 3D integration

As CMOS scaling proceeds with sub-10 nm nodes, new architectures and materials are implemented to continue increasing performances at constant footprint. Strained and stacked channels and 3D-integrated devices have for instance been introduced for this purpose. A common requirement for these new technologies is a strict limitation in thermal...

Interfacial properties of Cu/SiO2 using a multiscale modelling approach in electronic packages

Interfacial properties of Cu/SiO2 in semiconductor devices has continued to be the subject of challenging study for many years because of its difficulties in experimentally quantifying the critical strength of interface. In this paper, a multi-scale modeling approach is built to characterize the interfacial properties between Cu and SiO2. In...

Modeling nonlinear moisture diffusion in inhomogeneous media

While moisture diffusion in microelectronic device and packaging has been studied for decades, the problems involving complex nonlinear moisture diffusion in multi-material assembly have not been fully studied. This paper has developed a general nonlinear diffusion model by adopting water activity, a continuous state variable, as the field...

Deposition of conductive TiN shells on SiO2 nanoparticles with a fluidized bed ALD reactor

Conductive TiN shells have been deposited on SiO2 nanoparticles (10–20 nm primary particle size) with fluidized bed atomic layer deposition using TDMAT and NH3 as precursors. Analysis of the powders confirms that shell growth saturates at approximately 0.4 nm/cycle at TDMAT doses of >1.2 mmol/g of powder. TEM and XPS analysis showed that all...

Interface Characterization and Failure Modeling for Semiconductor Application

Due to the fact that microelectronics is made up from various materials with highly dissimilar thermo-mechanical properties, generally the interface between two adjacent materials is the place where delamination related failure most likely would occur. Failure of these interfaces results in decreased reliability and loss of performance of...

Fast Qualification Methods for Microelectronic Packages

This research aims at developing a knowledge based fast qualification method for moisture or thermally induced failure in microelectronic packages. Driven by the market competition and the need for shorter time to market, fast qualification tests are becoming more and more important for the industry. Qualifications are tests which are used in...

Prototyping of a Stretchable Microelectrode Array for Cardiotoxicity Drug Screening

Cardiotoxicity is a common side-effect of drugs and a major cause of late-stage drug rejections, costing the pharmaceutical companies massive amounts of money. A drug is cardiotoxic when it has a negative influence on the heart. Often, it changes the electrophysiological characteristics of the heart, resulting in arrhythmia. This can have...

Virtual thermo-mechanical prototyping of microelectronics devices

Microelectronics have pervaded our lives for the past fifty years, with massive penetration into health, mobility, safety and security, communications, education, entertainment and virtually every aspect of human lives. The main technology drivers that enabled this expansion are miniaturization and integration. The combination of these two has...