A 3D packaging approach for minimally invasive medical application catheter

Electronics packaging for medical applications is a growing field for research and development in the past 20 years. There are interesting approaches for in the human body diagnostics and surgery. In comparison to external ultrasound or X-ray examinations, advanced ultrasound diagnosis methods have been studied and applied, which can improve to investigate diseases for instance cancer or heart weakness. Finally, minimal invasive surgical methods with small catheters are reported in the literature as in [1], which provide opportunities for imaging and treatments with the help of ultrasound waves. A Flip chip - based 3D ultrasound catheter has been developed to build demonstrators and finally first serial parts. Materials have been evaluated as protection for wafer handling and Chip processing. Necessary process steps, like Au Stud bumping, isotropic conductive adhesive (ICA) printing, wafer dicing, Flip chip attach, capillary underfill, substrate dicing, 3D probe forming and encapsulation will be described. This report will show the major technological challenges and how they could be solved.