Phil Neudeck, Electronics Engineer, NASA’s John Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, OH

Neudeck: Probably not from a purely electrical perspective. Thermal cycling tends to attack the packaging of the chip, so you tend to lose the die attach, or you tend to lose the wire bonds. So it’s not the electronics part of the chip; it’s really more the mechanical packaging of the chip that I think the thermal cycling will attack. But being a scientist, I keep an open mind. We are going to run thermal cycling on these things and see how they last.

Of course, we’re talking about putting this in aerospace environments where there’s also vibration. These are issues our high-temperature packaging experts need to tackle. They don’t worry about this kind of a total cycle from 500° C all the way down to room temperature with silicon because they can’t operate over that broad a temperature range. So we’ve looked ahead and tried to anticipate some things. You can simulate things and learn a lot, but I am a firm believer in running it in the laboratory to see if it actually works.

NTB: Has anyone from the commercial sector expressed an interest in licensing this technology yet?

Neudeck: I would say yes and no. I had actually put in a couple of proposals with industry a few years ago and they were interested in the technology before this accomplishment. Certainly it will be interesting to see who gets on line as they hear more about this accomplishment. So there has been some general interest, but nobody’s come forward and put out a license agreement or anything just yet.

NTB: Any ideas about potential applications for this in the commercial sector?

Neudeck: Well, I think the obvious ones have all been mentioned. One of the interesting things with new technology is there’s always somebody out there in the commercial sector who sees a news release and they think of a new way to use it that I never thought of. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what does come out.

I believe if you push the envelope and you show a new capability, people will find new ways to use it. But my feeling is certainly that the application where it’s first going to be used is one that’s less cost sensitive, which would be aerospace. Then it’s going to work its way down the cost sensitivity chain to larger and larger uses as the technology becomes more commercialized, more understood, and more trusted.

The big issue with the commercial applications is you have to show very good reliability. Nobody likes it when their cell phone stops working. We’ve shown now that we can run a circuit for an awfully long time at 500°C, but we’ve only shown a handful of them. It’s obviously going to take more work by us and by the commercial people that we transfer this technology to [for them to] be comfortable enough to put their name on a product.

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