Electronic packaging continues to move towards improved performance and lower cost. Requirements of higher performance, reduced size, weight and cost of both High Density Interconnects (HDI) and high frequency (HF) devices has led to the search for new: materials, material combinations, methods, processes and production equipment. Efficient technologies for producing HDI, HF-circuits and integral passives are looked for. Also of interest are integrated packaging solutions for HDI, HF electrical packaging and optical interconnects and packaging.

The first experiences from Large Area Panel processing (LAP) and Sequential Build Up (SBU) technologies, using an UV-excimer projection lithography equipment and photopatternable ORMOCER® dielectrica, is presented. The state of the art LAP-equipment with 5 µm resolution pattern surfaces up to a size of 610 mm x 610 mm. LAP processing enables: miniaturized low cost & high performance electronics & photonics packaging. The advanced ORMOCER® dielectric and optical materials enable low temperature processing also on low cost polymer substrates such as FR-4-epoxy. Partitioning between cheap standard (lower) density interconnect in PCB-substrates and HDI in the upper thin film Layers is possible in order to reduce the number of metal layers and arrive at an optimal performance cost ratio for specific applications.

A sequentially build up structure with 4 dielectric layers have been deposited on a low cost FR-4 epoxy substrate for HF-applications. The dielectric Layers consist of a photo-patternable ORMOCER® and the intermediate metal-layers are from sputtered Cu. The UV-patterning was performed with the LAP projection lithography equipment. The produced microstrip lines, ring resonators, vias, stacked capacitors and filters have been characterized at frequencies from 1 to 40 GHz showing the potential of the new dielectric materials and processing technologies for microwave applications. The investigation of the material properties were performed both with a dielectric spectrometer and with a network analyzer were specially designed structures had been made for the characterization. Some of the measurements at HF were also evaluated and compared with simulations. The measured results showed a good agreement with the simulated response at HF. The experimentally obtained high-frequency properties of ε_r ≈ 3.05 and tan (δ) ≈ 0.024 at 10 - 40 GHz would be sufficient for many applications.

The dielectric properties of an electronics grade silicone elastomer have been investigated in the frequency intervals 0.1 Hz to 10 MHz and 7 GHz to 18 GHz, i.e. covering 11 decades of frequency. The low frequency measurements were performed with a dielectric spectrometer. The results are discussed in terms of performance and the usage of the material in electronic packaging. The dielectric constant in the frequency range 7 to 18 GHz. varied between 2.75 to 2.85 and the loss tangent between 0.018 to 0.04.