Prof. Busnaina speaks at the 15th Annual Flexible Printed Electronics Conference
Dr. Ahmed Busnaina, the Director of the NSF Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing spoke recently in Monterey, CA, at the 15th Annual Flexible Printed Electronics Conference (2016Flex). Focusing on flexible electronics, 2016Flex brought together hundreds of leaders in research, industry, and government from the US, including military agencies, defense contractors, electronics firms, suppliers, equipment manufacturers, and academia. Flexible electronics are lightweight, rugged, bendable, rollable, portable, and potentially foldable, and much work has been done to address the issues such as patterning and materials combinations to provide optimum performance of products such as thin-film transistors and photodiodes for flat panel displays.
Busnaina’s presentation addressed a novel manufacturing approach for fabricating 3-D interconnects for multilayer interconnected flexible electronics. In this process, colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) are precisely assembled and fused into 3-D nanostructures in a single step using an externally applied electric field. In contrast to electroplating or thin film deposition, this method can fabricate solid nanostructures from inorganic or organic NPs made of conducting, semiconducting or insulating materials with feature sizes from several microns down to 25 nm. This approach is expected to find application in MCPs, MCMs, chip-on-board (COB), wafer-level packaging (WLP), flexible electronics, hybrid silicon to printed electronics attachment.