The miniaturization of electronic systems and the explosive increase in their usage has increased the humidity related reliability issues of electronics devices and components especially having metal/alloys parts exposed on the Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) surface or embedded within the multi-layer laminate. Problems are compounded by the fact that these systems are built by multi-material combinations and additional accelerating factors such as humidity absorbing and corrosion causing process related residues, bias voltage, and unpredictable user environment. Demand for miniaturised device has resulted in higher density packing with reduction in component size and closer spacing thereby increasing the electric field, while thinner metallic parts needs only nano-grams levels of metal loss for causing corrosion failures. The reduced distances on the PCBA surface also result in tiny volume of water formed from humidity to connect between terminals.

Today the knowledge on humidity related reliability issues is very limited. The short course focuses on: (i) basics of humidity interaction with PCBA surface causing corrosion failures, (ii) PCBA production process and cleanliness aspects in related to humidity related reliability issues, (iii) influence of PCBA architecture on humidity related failures, (iv) essential tips and thump rules on how to control humidity related failures, and (v) some aspects of device level design in controlling humidity entry into the device.

Dr. Rajan Ambat is currently Professor of Corrosion and Surface Engineering at Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark. He is also the Manager for the Centre for Electronic Corrosion/CreCon Industrial Consortium at DTU. Climatic reliability of Electronics is a major research activity in his group in close collaboration with a number of major European industries including Danfoss, Vestas, Grundfos, Bosch, and Eltek. Various research activities on climatic reliability include material, component, PCBA, and device level issues and mitigation methods. He is also the Chairman for the Working Party on Corrosion reliability of electronic devices under European Federation of Corrosion. He is also part of the editorial board of corrosion journals.

Glass is used in numerous Semiconductor and Sensor applications. Examples are glass carrier wafers for power ICs, which allows for Silicon wafer handling in production and back grinding. IC packaging, Micro-batteries as well as multiple Camera Imaging, Pressure Sensor & MEMS applications. In this course the current and future applications of (Thin) glasses will be highlighted as well as an overview of specialty glass manufacturing, glass processing and the properties of specialty glasses will be given. A deeper dive into structured glass substrates will also be provided.

Matthias Jotz is the Product Manager at Sensor/Semicon, SCHOTT AG. Matthias studied mechanical and electrical engineering in Berlin and holds Master’s in International Business Administration from European University in Frankfurt (Oder) and NEOMA Business School in Reims, France. He started at SCHOTT AG as an Application Engineer worked in Process Engineering and headed the development activities for Ultra – Thin – Glass. After that, he switched to Product Management of the same product group within the company and now does Business Development and Product Management for electronics markets and structured products.