High-Temperature, Substrate-Agnostic Fine-Line Additive Metallization with Advanced Interconnects

High-temperature electronics are crucial for NASA missions involving extreme environments. The field of Additively Manufactured Electronics shows potential in providing enabling capability for future NASA missions that have very severe or unique volume constraints. Specifically, NASA has identified a specific need to be able to deposit conductor material on high-temperature, compatible insulating substrates. Manufacturing methods are able to print conductors and dielectrics at needed resolutions. However, there is a lack of data demonstrating operational reliability in extreme high temperature environments. Further, the effectiveness of material adhesion and material behavior at elevated temperatures should be understood given the extreme temperature target environments as well as demonstrating the capability of repeatable processing. International FemtoScience is proposing the development of an extreme environment electronics system for enabling field deployment of advanced Additive Manufacturing technologies. This technology will utilize novel Active Diamond Metal Matrix Braze conductors applied to any type of high temperature ceramic substrate, thus substrate-agnostic. This is accomplished via Aerosol Jet Printing that can deposit 10-micron wide conductors onto oxides, carbides, and nitrides, and can do so on 3-D geometries. 2-micron interconnect technology achieved with novel method of laser writing conductors inside nanodiamond films will also provide further interconnection capabilities for high power, Wide Bandgap devices such as Silicon Carbide and Gallium Nitride semiconductors. International FemtoScience, University of Arkansas, and University of Tennessee Spece Institute will perform research and development to demonstrate that the materials selected in the proposed extreme environment additive manufacturing electronics system have the capability to perform repeatable processing to demonstrate integration methods for extreme performance conductors.