I-Corps: Microscale Selective Laser Sintering Process

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to enable fabrication of high-density, high-aspect-ratio, freeform 3-dimentional (3D_ microscale interconnect structures at rates up to three times faster than existing technologies. This new commercial capability may have far-reaching implications due to the significant demand for new advanced packaging technologies for integrated circuits.

The microscale, selective, laser sintering system has the potential to lower the cost of consumer and business facing products such as cloud web services and mobile computing while enabling new high-performance embedded applications such as self-driving vehicle technology, radiation-hard and high-acceleration sensing, and internet-connected medical devices. This technology may also potentially enable new packaging architectures not possible using current state-of-the-art fabrication techniques, increasing the design freedom of integrated circuit architects and enabling new technologies and applications.

This I-Corps project further develops a microscale selective sintering process. In this process a layer of nanoparticle ink is coated using a slot-die coater and shuttled to the optical subsystem using a long-range custom air-bearing stage. There, a laser is focused through a digital micromirror device to sinter the nanoparticles into the desired pattern.

After the first layer is sintered, the air-bearing stage translates the substrate back under the coater for the deposition of the next layer. The process of deposition, transfer and sintering is then repeated, building the 3D part. The research focuses on improving the current capabilities of the subsystems within the proof-of-concept prototype tool and the developing computational models along with materials/thermal measurements to understand the nanoscale physics within the microscale selective sintering process.

Previous work has demonstrated fabrication of 3D metal structures with feature sizes of less than 5 microns and aspect ratios of greater than 20 to 1.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.