Aerosol Jet Printed Functional Nanoinks with High Reliability and Reconfigurability

摘要

Printed electronic components have long been desired fa the aerospace industry to enable prototyping, design verification, and concept validation of electronics at a much more rapid pace than photolithography or manual wire bonding processes. For satellites that are subjected to extreme thermal environments, highly reliable materials and processes are used. Aerosol jet printing has recently become more prevalent in commercial electronic manufacturing processes due to its consistency and fine feature size (<10 μm) when compared to other ink-based printing methods. Traditional conductive Ag and Cu inks produce printed materials that react under modest conditions, which degrades their electrical and RF properties leading to unreliable materials. Here we present a tailored Au nanoink that is aerosol jet printed to produce robust interconnects directly on GaAs microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) chips. The chips were subsequently subjected to reliability testing that included therrnal shock, thermal cycling, and current stress testing. At the conclusion of the reliability tests, no DC performance degradation was found indicating that aerosol jet printed Au nanoinks are an effective method for adding highly reliable on-chip circuit functionalities and features. Additionally, we presentanewfunctionalphasechange nanoink based on GeTe to enable direct printing of radio frequency (RF) reconfigurable switches and control circuitry into flexible antenna apertures, which eliminates the need for costly and time consuming wafer preparation, dicing, and assembly. The nanoink formulation, printed GeTe material characterization, and electrical measurement results willbe discussed including the phase change from amorphous state to crystalline state.