Panel processing for high volume/high mix manufacturing

After long years of development, embedding of components is an established technology, used in volume manufacturing. Today most prominent is the Fan-out Wafer-level Packaging, established on 200 and 300 mm production formats. Strong development efforts are towards Panel Level Packaging on large-scale rectangular substrates. Another technology in production is the embedding using Printed Circuit Board (PCB) technologies, already using large manufacturing formats. Since many years Fraunhofer IZM is developing PCB embedding processes. Applications were demonstrated for a large range of applications, from wearables and medical applications to power systems. Embedding technology offers numerous features like miniaturization, improved electrical performance, high reliability and the potential for realizing stackable modular systems. Basically two categories of processes for embedding of active and passive components into PCB structures were developed at IZM: embedding of chips, mainly for power electronics, and embedding of SMD components.