Scalable Micron-Sized Flexible Interconnects Enabled by Dielectric-Metal 3D Printing Technology for the Packaging of Large and Segmented Nuclear Physics Detectors

Particle accelerators in operation worldwide at renowned research facilities, such as, Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and Fermilab's Tevatron contain substantial number of high precision detectors that demand specific performance metrics such as high sensor tracking precision, fast readout speed and high radiation resistance. The enormous research and advances in nuclear physics and high-energy particle accelerator technologies has led to the development of extremely sensitive compact single photon counting detectors, digital X-ray detectors, and hybrid photodetectors which find applications in a wide range of areas and industries, from medical diagnostics, automotive, semiconductor manufacturing to particle detector technologies for screening at borders and national security. Particle detectors and pixel tracking detectors represented a major innovation and achievement, however despite its success, lack of upgradability makes it fundamentally challenging to use the latest electronics in these particle detectors, and the issue is more pronounced from the semiconductor industry’s continuous roll out of denser and smaller transistor nodes every 2 years. This alone limits the performance of these particle accelerators to older generation of electronics. Our Phase II proposal is specifically focused on the development of electronic modules using our micron- scale 3D flexible interconnects (3FIs) technology which replaces permanent wire bonds, tape bonding and flip-chip bonding in pixel detectors module circuits and facilitates frequent upgrades of these particle detector modules by applying the latest electronic chips to the detectors front-end modules. Moreover, multi-chip modules (MCM) seen in particle detectors which consists of multiple electronic chips will be upgradable at silicon chip level using 3FIs. This Phase II proposal presents a unique challenge and opportunity to develop an interconnect solution that not only eliminates permanents interconnects and hence enabling upgradability but also longer wire bonds that significantly impose higher inductive and capacitive parasitics will be replaced with shorter 3FIs—hence resulting in lower background noise. This will bring critical improvements for next generation of particle accelerators that is higher accuracy of particle detection.