Integrated Electronics Engineering Center

Imagine a diagnostic “pill” that doctors can navigate through your system to collect video and chemical data about what’s going on in your body. Or how about a space age, two-ply, self-assembling organic-inorganic thin film that makes expensive mirrors and lenses such as those used by NASA virtually indestructible.

Each of these items is at the heart of a real-life research project at Binghamton University’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC), where researchers know that small-scale electronics manufacturing means big business.

The IEEC, established in 1991, pursues leading edge research in electronics packaging. This field deals with the process of bringing a semiconductor chip, with its resident circuitry, to a form that can be integrated effectively into a larger microelectronics assembly. Most electronics industry experts believe that advances in electronics performance are principally limited by the current state of the art in packaging technology. The market push for greater functional power in smaller and smaller spaces can only be met through increases in packaging density and integration levels of microchips.

Here are just a few examples of the kind of real-world research and development support offered to companies by the IEEC:

  • Working with the IEEC’s equipment and staff, a New York State company did real time x-ray testing to determine the cause of connector assembly problems. The IEEC staff determined that the connectors were assembled incorrectly and were able to non-destructively identify the defect, making it possible for the company to implement corrective actions in the manufacturing process to eliminate the problem.
  • A company that makes dispensing equipment had a contamination problem with their circuit boards that presented a reliability concern that could eventually cause the machines to malfunction. The IEEC identified the location and cause of the contamination, and then defined a process that eliminated it. The IEEC also developed a rework process that permitted the company to clean and reuse field returns.
  • The IEEC performed thermal, shock and vibration testing to help them update a mobile video recording system adding capability and improved reliability. The tests would have been very costly if done at an independent testing laboratory. The resulting improvements in the product resulted in a significant increase in sales revenue for the company.

Membership in the IEEC provides an opportunity to share in the leading-edge electronics packaging research and development conducted at the center, including the expertise of student and faculty researchers, diagnostic equipment, literature, laboratories and the broad scope of intellectual property gathered and produced by the center. A variety of membership levels is available.

The range of research support and reliability testing services provided by the IEEC has attracted some of the country’s largest electronics companies, including IBM, ADI, and GE Corporate Research, as well as regional companies such as Universal Instruments, Lockheed Martin and British Airways Electronics, to the center’s membership rolls.
While maintaining its commitment to traditional electronics manufacturing, the IEEC is also becoming involved in small-scale electronics manufacturing research as part of its major mission. It’s a big time challenge that will rely on small-scale solutions according to Bahgat Sammakia, Interim Vice President for Research at Binghamton University and director of the IEEC, a state Center for Advanced Technology, for the last four years.

“There is no question that electronics manufacturing in the United States and worldwide is changing,” Sammakia said. “Many jobs are leaving the country and will not come back. Whenever a product becomes a very straightforward commodity that can be manufactured anywhere, it will be manufactured elsewhere.”

That cost-based reality creates a “change or perish” environment for the US electronics industry. Cheaper off-shore labor has led not only to a steady decline in traditional US electronics manufacturing jobs, but also to the accompanying loss of revenue to sustain the kind of research and development critical to the development of next-generation products. Without the availability of next-generation products, companies stand little chance of surviving today’s competitive and technology-hungry marketplace. That means research that spawns and supports the development and manufacture of such products is a crucial niche university-based research centers such as the IEEC need to fill.

“The advantage for companies to stay in the United States is not going to be for lower cost manufacturing, it’s going to be for advanced technology,” Sammakia said.

As part of its standing commitment to foster development of the US electronics industry, therefore, the IEEC is moving into new areas where micro- and nanotechnologies are the wave of the future. These areas will be driven by new development in small-scale electronics, including microelectric mechanical systems or MEMS, optical MEMS, known as MOEMS, and nanostructured materials.

Working at this scale requires vibration-free facilities and significantly more accurate instrumentation as well as a willingness to deal with change. While basic physics are understood at the nanostructure scale, materials and structures can behave completely differently at small scale than they do at large scale, and a defect that could be ignored at the micron level, probably will not be tolerable at nanometer scale. It’s likely that even the most basic assumptions about how materials behave will need to be rethought, and researchers at the IEEC are up for the challenge.

For more information about the IEEC, visit www.ieec.binghamton.edu/ieec.

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