Structuring Methods of Plastic Substrates for Electroplating Applications

Abstract

New approaches of packaging of integrated circuits show the need of flexible and cheap materials. Polymers offer possibilities regarding the flexibility and mass production opportunities in terms of roll to roll production for foil technology based substrates, as well the use of injection molding for more complex three-dimensional housings, circuits, electronics and even sensor actor arrays (2,3,4,5). A new manufacturing strategy to produce pre-structured wafer substrates which can be used for electroplating processes without the need of photolithography is developed. Important process steps are injection molding, sputter deposition, electroplating, chemical mechanical polishing and micro end milling. These manufacturing processes are not in the need of clean room technology and abstain from any lithography processes. Therefore this idea can be interesting for low cost production systems which exclude expensive clean room technology and expensive substrate materials without functionalized properties