ELECTROCHEMICAL ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING: A NOVEL APPROACH TO THERMAL MANAGEMENT OF ELECTRONICS
Madeline Frank, Michael Matthews, Joseph Madril, Ian Winfield
Abstract
The rise of 3D printing technology has changed the way we think about manufacturing, with the potential to revolutionize the way products are made. However, many industrially adopted additive manufacturing technologies are unable to meet the dimensional, design, and economic requirements necessary for the mass production of electronic components. Additionally, nearly all metal additive manufacturing systems today utilize thermal-based processing, including powder bed fusion (PBF) and binder jetting (BJ). These thermal processes/exposures can introduce undesirable thermo-mechanical stress within parts resulting in warpage and/or deformation of the component versus the component's nominal design. Thermal processes/exposures can also limit the range of underlying build-plate compositions with the consequence that adding complex metal features to organic electronic substrates is not feasible. Despite these limitations, metal additive manufacturing has shown promise as a useful manufacturing approach for electronic components by enabling the production of fine-featured copper-based thermal management elements within an electronic component. Electrochemical Additive Manufacturing (ECAM), developed by Fabric8Labs, has emerged as a novel additive manufacturing technique to produce electronics components with high-resolution features in high-purity copper. This paper will introduce the ECAM process and characterize the dimensional accuracy of copper-based structures at geometries relevant to electronic packaging applications.