What’s Happening at Aurora Circuits

As mentioned in our “What’s Happening” section, Aurora Circuits has the unique toolset and structure to assist with advanced packaging fabrication methods.  Due to the threat of IP theft, security concerns and other internal discussions, many semiconductor manufacturers are looking to domestic sources for these technologies.  For the uninitiated, a quick explanation of advanced packaging:

The goal of advanced packaging is to address the limitations of traditional packaging methods, such as interconnect delays, power consumption, and heat dissipation issues. By adopting advanced packaging techniques, semiconductor manufacturers can create smaller, more powerful, and energy-efficient devices that meet the demands of modern applications in areas like artificial intelligence, 5G communications, automotive electronics, and more. Today, packaging comes in many varieties, ranging from the traditional single-die chip or flipchip with wirebonding, as well as advanced products integrating multiple chipsets in a modular fashion.

The market pressure to pack more functionality into smaller devices, is being driven by the concept of heterogeneous integration as outlined in IEEE Electronics Packaging Society’s (EPS) Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap, of which defines the methodology of taking multiple components, and combine them into a single package on top of a substrate / interconnect structure.

Aurora Circuits’ thermal dissipation and advanced interconnect technologies (active thermal cavity & 380 w/K thermal pads) are at the forefront in providing solutions to meet the major challenges of heat dissipation for embedded high power and high power-density SiC MOSFET packages, as well as GaN based devices. From a temperature stability, dielectric breakdown strength, thermo-mechanical performance points of view, there are ideal PCB materials for embedded SiC MOSFET / GaN module packages, of which are centric to Aurora Circuits extensive material portfolio.

Aurora Circuits is uniquely qualified to meet the technical challenges that advanced packaging poses, while managing cost vs. performance dynamics, quality rigors required by the Aerospace, Space & Defense, Automotive, and Lighting markets, coupled with providing NPI / QTA services that allows for rapid product development / concurrent digital engineering.

The Challenge
Aurora received an opportunity to quote a LED vanity mirror for a major, fully electric car manufacturer. The initial design was a plated-through-hole version that was fairly sophisticated for the application. The Manufacturer also required a production commencement in 60 days to prevent a shutdown of the production line.

The Solution
The engineering team at Aurora Circuits suggested, after reviewing the manufacturer’s original design, that a redesign to a single-sided board would drastically save turnaround time and expense when starting production. The original design would sell for $2.25 each and require two separate printed circuit boards per vehicle. This particular part was re-engineered into a single-sided, common version for less than $0.90 each, thus saving $2.70 per vehicle. When applying this to the production volume, Aurora Circuits is saving the manufacturer over $375,000 on a model year basis. Also, to prevent any production line start up issues, Aurora Circuits built a small quantity of the plated through hole version until the single-sided version was fully tested and in full production.

The Takeaway
Our engineering competency found a creative way to rebuild the needed PCB without sacrificing delivery speed.