The Principles of "Smart" Encapsulation: Using Additive Printing Technology for the Realization of Intelligent Application-Specific Packages for IoT, 5G, and Automotive Radar Applications

This paper outlines the fundamental principles and processing characteristics of realizing application-specific "smart"' microelectronic packages utilizing fully-additive inkjet and 3D printing fabrication technologies. Standard square encapsulants are 3D-printed directly onto dies as a comparison to traditional transfer molding encapsulant techniques. This standard encapsulant is expanded through the integration of microfluidic channels directly within an encapsulant as a fully-printed solution for thermal management and fluid sensing applications with an embedded silicon die. The process flow of fully-printed partial encapsulants with subsequent capping is outlined for the realization of 3D TMV interconnects, where measurements demonstrate a low-loss versatile 3D interconnection method with adequate matching and line loss below 0.46 dB/mm up to 40 GHz. Finally, a fully-printed partial die encapsulant with TMV interconnection is presented as a proof-of-concept for process verification.