7 Common Features of a Box Build Assembly in Electronic Manufacturing

Many electronic manufacturers work with multiple vendors on projects. They source components from one company. Another ECM handles sub-assembly. Yet another partner tackles the final assembly. This can waste valuable time and money. Plus, little bits of your quality can fall between the cracks.

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Why send your project to several different sub assemblers? Stick with someone who can be dedicated to your project from start to finish. Find a box build electronics manufacturer and keep it all in one place. A box build is a systems integration. It is your complete electronic assembly placed inside an enclosure, or box. Common services and features of a box build include the following:

1. Design

Perhaps your design needs a little help. Or, maybe you have no idea how to house your electronic assembly. Some electronic contract manufacturers will handle that as part of the box build assembly. Your ECM’s engineers can assist with layout, concepts, material selection, and tooling. Manufacturing is their specialty, so it makes sense to let them handle the design to come up with the perfect solution for your product.

2. Testing

Testing is an important part of product reliability and assures that your product will stand up to everyday use. Your box build assembly should include comprehensive testing and inspection to determine if changes need to be made before assembly begins. This can include prototyping to meet your specifications and helping to detect design flaws.

3. Manufacture Assembly

Your box build team will fully assemble your product from start to finish. They will also help determine the input/output of power, environmental constraints, mounting options, and power sources. They will also take other requirements into consideration, such as high security needs.

4. Sub-Assembly

Several sub-assemblies will go into your finished product. As part of a box build, your ECM will not only design, test, and build the sub-assemblies for your box builds, but they will install them, too.

5. Cable and Wire Harness

High or low voltage cable harness assemblies and wire harnesses will be incorporated into your box build. This can include custom cable assemblies or wire harnesses fabricated to meet your specifications.

6. Custom Enclosure

Sometimes your product needs a special enclosure. It may require unique dimensions or special spacing, routing, or mounting. Your ECM must look at the size and shape of all components, determine how they will stay in place, and take into consideration how the user will access sensors and power.

7. Component Assembly and Installation

Your product may require a special component. Your box build assembler will be able to design and fabricate any special component your electronics assembly will need, as well as install it.

Deposition

The process begins with a silicon wafer. Wafers are sliced from a salami-shaped bar of 99.99% pure silicon (known as an 'ingot') and polished to extreme smoothness. Thin films of conducting, isolating or semiconducting materials – depending on the type of structure being made – are deposited on the wafer to enable the first layer to be printed on it. This important step is commonly known as 'deposition'.

As microchip structures 'shrink', the process of patterning the wafer becomes more complex. Advances in deposition, as well as etch and lithography – more on that later – are enablers of shrink and the pursuit of Moore's Law. These advances include the use of new materials and innovations that enable increased precision when depositing these materials.

Photoresist coating

The wafer is then covered with a light-sensitive coating called 'photoresist', or 'resist' for short. There are two types of resist: positive and negative.

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The main difference between positive and negative resist is the chemical structure of the material and the way that the resist reacts with light. With positive resist, the areas exposed to ultraviolet light change their structure and are made more soluble – ready for etching and deposition. The opposite is true for negative resist, where areas hit by light polymerize, meaning they become stronger and more difficult to dissolve. Positive resist is most commonly used in semiconductor manufacturing because its higher resolution capability makes it the better choice for the lithography stage.

Several companies around the world produce resist for semiconductor manufacturing, such as Fujifilm Electronics Materials, The Dow Chemical Company and JSR Corporation.

Lithography

Lithography is a crucial step in the chipmaking process, because it determines just how small the transistors on a chip can be. During this stage, the chip wafer is inserted into a lithography machine (that's us!) where it's exposed to deep ultraviolet (DUV) or extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light. This light has a wavelength anywhere from 365 nm for less complex chip designs to 13.5 nm, which is used to produce some of the finest details of a chip – some of which are thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand.

Light is projected onto the wafer through the 'reticle', which holds the blueprint of the pattern to be printed. The system's optics (lenses in a DUV system and mirrors in an EUV system) shrink and focus the pattern onto the resist layer. As explained earlier, when light hits the resist, it causes a chemical change that enables the pattern from the reticle to be replicated onto the resist layer.

Getting the pattern exactly right every time is a tricky task. Particle interference, refraction and other physical or chemical defects can occur during this process. That's why, sometimes, the pattern needs to be optimized by intentionally deforming the blueprint, so you're left with the exact pattern that you need. Our systems do this by combining algorithmic models with data from our systems and test wafers in a process referred to as 'computational lithography'. The resulting blueprint might look different from the pattern it eventually prints, but that's exactly the point. Everything we do is focused on getting the printed patterns just right.

Etch

The next step is to remove the degraded resist to reveal the intended pattern. During 'etch', the wafer is baked and developed, and some of the resist is washed away to reveal a 3D pattern of open channels. Etch processes must precisely and consistently form increasingly conductive features without impacting the overall integrity and stability of the chip structure. Advanced etch technology is enabling chipmakers to use double, quadruple and spacer-based patterning to create the tiny features of the most modern chip designs.

As with resist, there are two types of etch: 'wet' and 'dry'. Dry etching uses gases to define the exposed pattern on the wafer. Wet etching uses chemical baths to wash the wafer. Companies such as Lam Research, Oxford Instruments and SEMES develop semiconductor etching systems.

Chips are made up of dozens of layers. So, it's important that etching is carefully controlled so as not to damage the underlying layers of a multilayer microchip structure or – if the etching is intended to create a cavity in the structure – to ensure the depth of the cavity is exactly right. When you consider that some microchip designs such as 3D NAND are reaching up to 175 layers, this step is becoming increasingly important – and difficult.

Ion implantation

Once patterns are etched in the wafer, the wafer may be bombarded with positive or negative ions to tune the electrical conducting properties of part of the pattern. Raw silicon – the material the wafer is made of – is not a perfect insulator or a perfect conductor. Silicon’s electrical properties are somewhere in between. Directing electrically charged ions into the silicon crystal allows the flow of electricity to be controlled and transistors – the electronic switches that are the basic building blocks of microchips – to be created. This process is known as ‘ion implantation’.

After the ions are implanted in the layer, the remaining sections of resist that were protecting areas that should not be modified are removed.

Packaging

The entire process of creating a silicon wafer with working chips consists of thousands of steps and can take more than three months from design to production. To get the chips out of the wafer, it is sliced and diced with a diamond saw into individual chips. Cut from a 300-mm wafer, the size most often used in semiconductor manufacturing, these so-called 'dies' differ in size for various chips. Some wafers can contain thousands of chips, while others contain just a few dozen.

The chip die is then placed onto a 'substrate'. This is a type of baseboard for the microchip die that uses metal foils to direct the input and output signals of a chip to other parts of a system. And to close the lid, a 'heat spreader' is placed on top. This heat spreader is a small, flat metal protective container holding a cooling solution that ensures the microchip stays cool during operation.

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