Member information

Electronics is a strategic area that national and European bodies support. Packaging and interconnect include critical skills needed in the design and manufacture of electronic end products. IMAPS Nordic makes an outlook into the field of R&D programmes and their goals, management and results. We will have a panel of representatives from EU and national R&D financing institutes, national research centre managers and some top company R&D managers to bring their views on running and planned programmes. We will discuss with the panel the needs in Nordic industry and society and how we can improve efficiency and how observant flexibility can be combined with long term forward looking plans.

Discussing topics will include:

• Very short statistics of microelectronics and packaging R&D volumes in
  the Nordic countries, public and private

• Industry (big and small companies in the supply chain) and government (including social responsibility) impact on guiding the R&D

• Level of innovation and added value in different types of projects (long term guiding contra innovation)

• The role of Europe and the Nordic countries 

• The role of IMAPS and other global societies

• Global networking, R&D loosing boarders?

• Transfer of R&D results to production

• Actual R&D programmes and how to join

The panel discussion will flow from global viewpoint to focused on Sweden / Ericsson in the following order:

• Rao Tummala, Professor in Microsystems Packaging, Director NSF-ERC in SOP Technology , Georgia Institute of Technology, USA 

• Francisco J. Ibañez, Principal Scientific Officer IST Programme, European Commission Information Society Directorate-General

• Oddur Már Gunnarsson, Senior Advisor, NIF, Nordisk Industrifond

•  Jorma Lammasniemi, Professor, Executive director, Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), Electronics Institute

• Sven-lngmar Ragnarsson, Dr. Eng., VINNOVA, The Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems

• Kåre Gustafsson, Electronic Packaging Expert at Ericsson, Program Director for EPROPER, Chairman for Electronic Council at the Swedish Engineering Industries Association

Each panellist will give a brief introduction, 10 minutes each. After that we continue with comments among the Panel, discussion on what turn out to be the hot topic and in the end a period of questions and comments from the audience.

Panel Discussion Synopsis

Prof. Rao R Tummala

Pettit Chair Professor and Director of NSF-ERC, Georgia Tech, USA
R& D Approach in the US, with GT- PRC as a new Model for 21 st Century in Electronics

The R & D approach is the US is simple in concept. The government funds the basic and engineering research and goes to the extent it is pre-competitive . The focus is on creating new knowledge and educating students. The industry then takes over and applies this knowledge and the educated students to make competitive products.
So the roles of universities , therefore, is to explore the frontiers in science and engineering and educate students in those ready to hit the ground the running when they join the industry. The role of industry accordingly is to take those intellectual and human resources and apply them to design, develop and manufacture competitive products with which to make money. The role of government then is to provide the basic pre-competitive infrastructure human and intellectual knowledge ,and tools for the industry to succeed.

Does the existing model work as we look ahead? 

There are fundamental changes shaping the electronics landscape.

1. Industry is cutting back on its R& D.
2. It is looking to EMS companies to manufacture
3. EMS companies are not investing in future
4. EMS companies are looking to OEMs for new developments
5. OEM companies are concentrating on high profit margin segments
a. Soft ware
b. Services
c. Design
d. Niche Technologies

New Model is Necessary

This is what is referred to Georgia Tech PRC model. In this model, the government, industry and Academia work together, share the investments and share the benefits. The model requires:

a Academia to take on pre-Competitive but industry culture role
b. System and system testbed focus
c. Team Research
d. Strategic focus
e. Fundamental to enabling to system prototypes.
f. Transfer the system focus technology and system educated students

Prof. Rao Tummala will elaborate and discuss the above in more detail.

Francisco J. Ibañez

Head of Sector Subsystems Technologies
IST Programme
European Commission

A new Framework Programme for Research and Development in Europe for the
period 2002-2006 has been recently approved. A budget of 17.5 Billion Euro
will support R&D actions in the field of genomics, information and
communication technologies, aeronautics, space, and others. A number of
innovative elements will be introduced: the ERA (European Research Area)
dimension will ensure that the programme funding contributes to aggregate
European, national and private research effort; new instruments (Integrated
Projects and Network of Excellence) will be used to build critical mass and
apply a more strategic thinking; flexibility and simplification of
procedures, etc.
To help to better define the technological priorities of the programme a
call for expressions of interest has been launched, with a very high
response (over 15000 expressions).
At the workshop the new IST (Information Society Technologies) will be
described, with emphasis on the new R&D instruments. Conclusions on the
analysis of the Expression of Interest received will also be presented.

Oddur Már Gunnarsson
Senior Advisor, NIF, Nordisk Industrifond

The Nordic Industrial Fund aim to strengthen the Nordic business community by developing innovative collaboration through a joint Nordic knowledge market.

Projects and activities financed by the Nordic Industrial Fund are expected to further its vision of a joint knowledge market, through which the industrial and public sectors in Norden will have access to the competence and expertise they require.

This knowledge market operates at all levels, from commercial companies and professional or trade organizations to academic research institutions and the public sector.

Jorma Lammasniemi

Professor, Executive director, Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), Electronics Institute

• The presentation is based on the experiences of microelectronics research 
  and development at VTT. VTT is a non-profit contract research 
  organisation, owned by the state of Finland

• VTT is running two major R&D programmes in microelectronics manufacturing: at the Oulu site in Northern Finland, packaging and 
  micromodule fabrication is main themes, and at the Espoo site in the South 
  of Finland silicon microelectronics and microsystems are studied. In Oulu 
  the present 350 m2 clean room will be doubled this year and on the same 
  time the present Espoo 1000 m2 clean room facility will be doubled. VTT 
  has taken a shared facility approach: the investments are done in 
  co-operation between VTT, industrial companies and universities.

• Most of our research targets relate to communication technologies, 
  especially wireless communication or sensing and instrumentation

• The research of electronics manufacturing technologies is characterised 
  by rather large investments in clean rooms, processing equipment and other 
  research tools. At VTT the investment needs are clearly largest among all 
  of our various technology fields. Therefore the well planned and efficient 
  use of the investments is of crucial importance.

• Is it possible to use the same investments for teaching, research and 
  industrial purposes. There are common interests and conflicting demands. 
  Most often our goal is to cover the process from research prototypes to 
  preproduction. Some separate clean room areas are reserved only for the 
  companies. Some process stations and test equipment are time-shared.

• VTT plans to increase international cooperation in manufacturing 
  research, the trend is clear: the national borders in R&D will have smaller 
  role in the future
  

Kåre Gustafsson

Electronic Packaging Expert at Ericsson
Program Director for EPROPER
Chairman for Electronic Council at the Swedish Engineering Industries Association

Abstract

Smart packaging technologies have given and will give competitive advantages. But what/which players will drive technology development in the future? Product development in the future will in many cases be made in networks, where different types of companies co-operate. Electronic packaging and production technologies might be a bottleneck for quick introduction of new technologies. Research Institutes and Universities will have a new and important role in working as catalysts for industrialisation of new technologies. The need for new technology development ought to be derived from application and services. In order to achieve fast introduction of new technologies and products more efforts have to be put on infrastructural issues. Some new technologies might work fine in lab scale – but what will happen when volume production starts?

Development of electronic products will, to an increasing extent, utilise standardised module and interfaces that enables decreased TTM for complex systems. The modules can be custom specific, but they use the same basic structures. It will be possible to connect these modules in a plug-and play way. They will use open communication bus interfaces that can be either electrical, optical, radio or a combination of those. This has already occurred for design of Personal Computers. Almost anybody can separately buy motherboard, processor modules, memory modules, power modules etc. and assemble it at home, and it works at 2 GHz! Specialised sub-system producers will be the main drivers for new technology introduction.

Dominating players for new technology introduction

In the 80ies and 90ies large computer, telecom and consumer electronic companies spent a lot of resources on investigating and introducing new technologies. These companies created de facto standards and they took the role as implementers of the new technology and forced semiconductor vendors to introduce new packaging technology. In the telecom area even operators such as AT&T and BT had an extensive technology competence and had rules for what technologies the system vendors were allowed to use. In the future the situation will be completely different. There will be a complex network between the players in figure 1.The final customers have limited interest in the choice of technology. They specify price and performance and assume that their vendors take responsibility that the products will function over its lifetime. New packaging and production technology has to be introduced simultaneously by a number of different players, system integrators, IC-vendors and contract manufacturers. 

The need for de facto standards will be more important in this situation. In the old structure, the vertically integrated companies could achieve comparative advantages by the choice of a more cost effective packaging technology than their competitors. With dominating contract manufacturers the situation will be different. There will be little comparative benefits from using new technologies – all OEM companies will get access to the technology at almost the same time. Intelligent use of design systems and simulation tools will be relatively more important in order to decrease the time to market. The OEM companies have to clearly define their core competence. In certain niche areas it may be beneficial to develop new components and electronic packaging technologies that give competitive advantage. 

New services and applications will put a demand on improved packaging technology with respect to production cost, size, weight, flexibility signal performance, reliability and environmental friendliness. But which companies will lead the development; OEM producers, IC producers, packaging houses or contract manufactures? One solution might be that universities and research institutes are given a new role as catalysts for introduction of new technologies.

Services -> products -> technologies

Government funded electronic packaging and production research in Sweden has normally been defined by technology push. University researchers have prepared project proposals and then they have tried to get support from industry before submitting the final proposal. This secures some level of industrial relevance, but it is not bound to reflect the real need for certain services or certain products that has defined the necessary technology development. An alternative market pull structure implies that future application areas, including services and products, ought to be defined and the necessary technology platforms ought to be derived from the applications (figure 2). A technology platform must cover all required technologies and infrastructures that are needed in order to start volume production. Some of the technologies within a platform might need further development at the university research level. This development might be made within Sweden or abroad, for instance by participation in European research projects. 


Electronic packaging and production is interdisciplinary and involves disciplines like materials technology, chemistry, physics, electronics, logistics, and economics. The demands/needs for decreased cost and improved performance will be met in a state of hard international competition. New materials and production technologies are being developed to meet these demands. Universities and research institutes have to take a wide view covering all aspects of successful introduction and industrialisation of new technologies and processes. PhD students in this area need to have a truly cross-disciplinary approach, in a partly non-traditional academic way.

Conclusions

• Product development will to an increasing degree be made in networks by virtual vertically integrated companies

• Modules (SoP) with standardized interfaces will be important building blocks in OEM design

• Research institutes, and to some extent Universities, will have a role in creating de facto standards and work as catalysts for the virtual networks.

• European research projects will be a very important driver/source for new packaging technologies

• OEM companies will, to some extent, make their own development efforts in niche areas where they utilize their core competence

• Sub-system design companies will play a major role in the implementation of new electronic packaging and production technologies