Abstract
Be it the trillion-dollar economy dreamed up by Cisco Systems at one extreme, or the multitude of small crowdsourced projects at the other, there is no denying that IoT is capturing minds and making the news. Each company is vying for a piece of the pie, with semiconductor suppliers scrambling to call the latest releases “IoT-ready”. Not wanting to feel left out, the PCB industry is of course finding ways to support this nascent economy. As main concerns are small sizes, low energy consumption and short cycle times, one solution is embedding. By placing active and passive components within the PCB itself, the system can:- be more integrated, as components disappear from the surface, making space for additional functionality, larger battery or simply fit in a smaller housing,- have lower losses, as stacking SMT components on top of the embedded allows for short connections, thus lowering resistance and inductance,- be created faster, to enable dimensional and functional integration without relying on complex and costly SoC design. Starting with a backgrounder on common embedding technologies currently available from leading suppliers, the paper will present recent advances from AT&S's ECP® (Embedded-Component Packaging), including reliability data. Expanding from that field, the document will explore its future and extreme applications, such as high-power (multi-kW) and fine-pitch fields for industrial and automotive devices, showing the scalability of the technology and the evolutions supported by the EU-funded EmPower and UNSETH projects.
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