ECSEL JU Project APPLAUSE

Internet of Things, 5G, Big Data, Smart mobility, Smart Health – and smart everything – create an ever-increasing demand for faster, high throughput connectivity and better sensoring capabilities. To stay competitive, the European industry needs highly specialized systems and components that enable added value and new functionalities in their products. Here, “Moore than Moore” chips are required to reach ever increasing performance targets and smaller, more convenient form factors, and of course lower manufacturing costs.

Advanced packaging and assembly solutions have a central role in this development. The heterogeneity of systems to be packaged is getting more complex than ever. The package is becoming an integral part of the system and its mechanical, electromagnetic and thermal behaviours will have an increasing impact on the success of the product’s performance, reliability and cost. The strong drive for more complex systems and more advanced packaging, including optics and photonics, creates a chance to retain the manufacturing and packaging value chain to Europe – or even start to bring it back.

APPLAUSE will support this by building on the European expertise in advanced packaging and assembly to develop new tools, methods and processes for high volume mass manufacturing. This project will focus on a set of key technologies, which all relate to new assembly and packaging methods for electrical and optical components. The technologies will be piloted in 6 industrial Use Cases related to:

1. Substantially smaller 3D integrated ambient light sensor for mobile and wearable applications (AMS)
2. High performance, low cost, uncooled thermal IR sensor for automotive applications (IDEAS)
3. High speed datacom transceivers with reduced manufacturing costs (DustPhotonics)
4. Flexible cardiac monitoring patch and miniaturized cardiac implants with advanced monitoring capabilities (GE Healthcare and Cardiaccs)
5. Novel manufacturing platform for optical and other MEMS requiring exposed area cavities (Murata)
6. Optical water measurement modules with cost-effective packaging of components (Vaisala)

The APPLAUSE consortium (34 partners from 11 countries) is built of several leading experts from European electronics packaging companies representing different value chain levels related to advanced packaging and smart system integration. The parties have complementary expertise in conception, design, packaging, testing and manufacturing of electronic components, as well as a wide range of expertise from several different end use areas. The unique European ecosystem established within the consortium represents the competitive, leading edge of the technologies available.