Hang around - the fun is just beginning
11/01/2001
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If you want to see the future of packaging, check out "Brain-Implantable Biomimetic Electronics as the Next Era in Neural Prosthetics" in the July 2001 issue of Proceedings of the IEEE. This article goes way beyond wafer-level packaging, optoelectronics, MEMS or any of the other emerging technologies that will keep us employed for the next several years. It is about multi-chip packaging and advanced bonding technologies that create replacement parts for the human brain. And it's happening now.
It is believable that some engineers in the electronics industry have become disillusioned with their careers. Given the recent slump and the recurring volatility, the high-tech world might not be what you envisioned when you signed up for an engineering major in college. Or perhaps you are a packaging industry veteran finding it hard to be motivated by developing technology that lets manufacturers put yet another obscure function in some new portable electronic contraption.
If you are questioning the ultimate usefulness of what you are doing in the packaging world, hang in there. Would you be more pumped up if you knew that the multi-chip integration technology you were working on would be making components that would replace damaged parts of human brains? I'm pretty sure I would. If bonding to copper has become too routine for you, you can start working on your process development matrices for bonding to neurons. I think this would get me excited about going to work every day (and not just because I frequently feel like my brain needs some new parts).
The challenges faced in this kind of work include thermal management, because the functioning of living tissue is very sensitive to temperature. Sharpen up those thermal models and measurement techniques! Electrical performance is also a critical concern, of course. In one experiment, the 60-micron pitch electrodes connecting to a hippocampus provided acceptably low cross-talk, but the pitch needs to shrink. Keep that electrical analysis capability up to date to make sure that fine pitch neural bonding meets the specs. Perhaps that 25-micron pitch wire bonding technology will get used for something, after all.
The frontiers for electronic packaging technology are truly astonishing. People who stick around to be part of it are in for some huge rewards. I hope that I'm still doing my job when it happens so that I can write about all of it in these pages, unless the articles get sent by wireless e-mail directly to your brain. ...
Thanks for reading,
Jeffrey C. Demmin
Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]