IN Brief:
- Electroninks, EMD Electronics, and Qualipoly have formed a semiconductor-packaging materials development partnership.
- A dedicated EMD Electronics application laboratory will operate within Qualipoly's facilities.
- The partners intend to shorten material qualification by combining semiconductor materials, conductive inks, and packaging-process expertise in one development environment.
Electroninks, EMD Electronics, and Qualipoly have formed an advanced semiconductor-packaging partnership centred on a dedicated EMD Electronics application laboratory inside Qualipoly’s facilities. The arrangement brings semiconductor materials, conductive-ink technology, and packaging-process expertise into one development environment, with the partners aiming to shorten the route between material formulation, application testing, qualification, and customer deployment.
The laboratory is development and application infrastructure rather than a new semiconductor production facility. Its role is to give engineers from the three organisations a shared environment in which materials and processes can be evaluated together before customers commit them to manufacturing. The companies have not disclosed the laboratory’s area, equipment list, investment, staffing, or production capacity.
Electroninks specialises in metal-complex conductive inks for additive electronics manufacturing and semiconductor packaging. Its portfolio covers silver, gold, platinum, nickel, and copper formulations, alongside complementary materials intended for applications including PCB manufacture, package interconnects, medical electronics, wearables, and other electronic systems.
EMD Electronics supplies a broader range of semiconductor materials and process technologies and is the electronics business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, in the US and Canada. Qualipoly adds experience in synthetic resins, UV-curable materials, electronic chemicals, and conductive silver paste from its manufacturing base in Taiwan.
Combining those capabilities addresses a persistent advanced-packaging problem. A conductive material that performs well in isolation still has to survive a complete process involving substrates, dielectrics, surface treatments, deposition equipment, curing conditions, feature geometry, and subsequent thermal or mechanical operations. Bulk conductivity is only one specification; adhesion, dimensional stability, surface condition, process compatibility, and long-term reliability can determine whether a material is usable in production.
The challenge becomes more demanding as packaging moves towards finer redistribution structures, heterogeneous integration, chiplets, and larger substrates. Additive deposition can potentially place conductive material only where it is required and remove some of the steps associated with conventional subtractive metallisation, but those advantages only matter if the resulting structures can be printed, cured, inspected, and repeated within an economically useful process window.
The application laboratory is intended to move more of that problem-solving into one location. Instead of a formulation being developed by one supplier before passing sequentially to an equipment specialist, packaging company, and customer, engineers will be able to investigate the interactions between material and process more directly. The partners say the arrangement should reduce friction and accelerate qualification, although they have not attached a quantified time saving to the programme.
Melbs LeMieux, co-founder and president of Electroninks, said the collaboration is intended to unite EMD Electronics’ materials capability with Qualipoly’s packaging expertise and Electroninks’ additive-manufacturing work. The more important engineering question will be how extensively the laboratory can reproduce the conditions a material will encounter in a customer’s packaging line.
Useful qualification can require considerably more than a successful deposition trial. Feature dimensions, line resistance, adhesion, curing profile, substrate interaction, thermal cycling, humidity exposure, mechanical stress, cross-section analysis, and compatibility with neighbouring materials can all influence adoption. Customers may then require further reliability work around their particular package architecture before a new conductor enters a controlled manufacturing process.
For Electroninks, a co-located development environment could reduce one of the barriers facing additive conductive materials. A packaging manufacturer has little incentive to replace an established metallisation process simply because an alternative ink has attractive datasheet properties. The supplier has to demonstrate that the complete material-and-process combination can achieve the required geometry and electrical performance repeatedly enough to justify the cost and risk of changing production.
The partnership also reflects the increasingly interconnected nature of advanced packaging. As packaging absorbs functions once divided between the monolithic die, package substrate, and PCB, material choices can affect lithography, thermal behaviour, electrical loss, mechanical stress, assembly yield, and inspection several process stages later. Materials suppliers consequently have to understand more of the process around their own chemistry if they want new formulations to move beyond laboratory samples.
No qualified package, customer production programme, or commercial material deployment has yet been announced from the collaboration. The laboratory should therefore be judged initially by the quality of the engineering data it produces rather than by claims of faster time to market. The useful milestones will be named materials entering qualification, documented feature sizes, reliability results, and evidence that processes developed in the shared environment can be transferred successfully into customer manufacturing.
Putting formulation and application engineers in the same facility is less dramatic than announcing another packaging fab, but it tackles a more routine obstacle to materials adoption: proving that a new chemistry continues to work once it leaves the supplier’s laboratory. For advanced packaging, where increasingly fine structures depend on tightly controlled interactions between many different materials, that validation work can determine whether a promising conductor becomes a manufacturing process or remains a formulation sample.
