Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM
Fraunhofer IZM:
Mr. Aschenbrenner, we are very excited to hear you summarize your 2019’s highlights and lowlights. But let’s start with you. On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with the results achieved in your department?
Rolf Aschenbrenner:
Hmm: 9!
IZM: That’s really very good.
RA: Yes, I’m very satisfied. For a department, unfortunately, the financial situation is always important and ours is outstanding. I have really experienced a lot in over 20 years as a department head at Fraunhofer IZM, but I have never had such a good year.
IZM: So why not give yourself a 10?
RA: Well, there’s always room for improvement! (Laughs)
IZM: So 9 with an asterisk. (Laughs) The most important words have just been said, but let’s get down to the details. When you look back, is there a 2019 success project that kept you busier than the others?
RA: One of the biggest success stories was the conclusion of our first Panel Level Packaging consortium right at the beginning of the year with the final meeting in January and February. It was great that we were able to put together an international consortium of that kind. I think it was very good to see it through and am very pleased with the results that have been achieved. And you can see the success of the project, as we will continue with the next consortium in a somewhat similar constellation.
IZM: Can you tell us a bit more about it? Who’ll be involved again, or who’ll be a new addition?
RA: Yes. Intel will be involved again, which is very important. Material and PCB manufacturers are also back, but Intel is very important, especially as an international partner. In the first year, we worked very hard along an entire process chain and, indeed, reached our limits – especially in terms of production volume. PLP 2.0 is therefore also intended to solve more fundamental problems at the request of our partners, where individual production processes are singled out and then prepared for the partners and our work steps are made transparent.
IZM: That's quite a Fraunhofer-like approach. Not dealing with large masses, but with a focus on passing on scientific learning instead. Okay, but was there another technological project here that you would highlight?
RA: There are currently 160 of us employees divided into eight groups. Of course, it is extremely difficult to always pick out one project because there might be fifty projects are running simultaneously. I think everyone has their own special topics and areas and they are also very successful publicly. The goal is to keep the balance in order to fulfill the Fraunhofer model. That means fulfilling 40 percent industrial yield and then filling up the rest with public projects. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job of it. And this is also very important, because if you only work according to industry requirements, the employees are also exposed to much greater pressure.
IZM: It certainly sounds as though there will be enough topics this year to keep you and the individual groups within your department busy. What topics will be included?
RA: The topic of panels in combination with chip embedding remains important for us – both in molding compounds and in PCBs. Well, we started the whole topic ten years ago and thanks to the support of the state of Berlin in the AdaptSys project we have been able to acquire the right devices. That gave us an unmistakable push. And the unique selling proposition that we have developed here worldwide will naturally be further expanded in the coming years. We have a unique selling proposition in the sciences because we are the only institute in the world that is able to realize prototype production of organic carriers as system integration. And that’s something we are trying to expand on.
The second big topic is power electronics. This area is so important because it’s one in which German industry is very strong. The trend towards smaller modules is still a factor and will continue to be of great importance in the future. There is also a great effort to miniaturize the modules and/or the inverters in this area. Heterogeneous integration, which means integrating various devices in as flat a package as possible, is the big challenge here. And it's one that we’ve been quite successful at coping with. This can be seen from the fact that the individual groups, such as power electronics, metallic interconnection technologies, and chip and wire bonding, work closely together here and thus, compared to other departments, there is a self-sufficient value chain.
Furthermore, optics and photonics are also worth mentioning at this point. These topics have recently been enjoying increasing relevance and popularity in the industry and will therefore definitely be in focus in the coming years.
Finally, it is important to emphasize once again the work with flexible substrates for medical engineering and bioelectronics. These topics are a wonderful addition to the department. So I’d say that they're the four most important topics.
IZM: And if one were to break this down to generally understandable applications, you could say that you and your department have your fingers in a lot of pies, right?
RA: Yes, indeed. The automotive area covers power electronics. Photonics and optics are involved wherever light and optics, for high data transmission, play a role and are found in data centers and the currently very much in demand cloud communication. Medical technology is also becoming increasingly important, for example in terms of how we can relieve the burden on physicians and what we can do about a lack of specialists, etc. So there we are definitely broadly based and that is also a huge advantage for us. That means that if we should lose one branch of industry, it would be a loss that we would be able to handle. In other words, we do not act as a process chain built up in succession, but rather as self-sufficient individual parts along the value chain that can operate individually.
IZM: But let’s be honest—sometimes there are bumps in the road. Even if you can’t or don’t want to go into detail about it, what do you hope runs more smoothly this year?
RA: The increasing administrative workload is clearly noticeable. This is not caused by our administration, but mainly due to the changed demands on project planning. This is now slowly becoming noticeable in the individual departments. For the coming year, I would therefore like to see less logistics and more dialogue between and within the units, because innovation is based on good communication.
IZM: Last, but not least: If you could choose what your department stands for, what would you say?
RA: This can easily be summed up in one word – diversity – both in terms of employees and topics. People from the most varied fields of experience can work independently on the most diverse projects and, what’s more, there is room for the exchange of experiences. This means that we can all learn together, meaning that we’re not all stuck in a rut.
That’s a great parting shot. THANK YOU VERY MUCH for giving us your time and for the many applied-research projects that you and your team are implementing.
