Environmental and Cost Assessment of Several Injection Molded Powder Electronics Packaging Materials

Electronics manufacturing technology has been advancing at an increasing rate for the past few decades and has forced related industries to do the same. One related industry involves the packaging technology used to enclose chips for power electronics. As demands of electronics manufacturers continue to increase in terms of cost, performance, and environmental impacts, so do demands on the packaging technologies involved. A variety of packaging materials have been used and proposed. The performance of each material varies in terms of ease of manufacturing, as well as its heat transfer properties. This study addresses performance, cost, and environmental impact measures to assist in selecting the most appropriate electronics packaging material. A performance study identified epoxy, aluminum nitride (AlN), and silicon carbide (SiC) to be the most viable options. Further analysis then found that epoxy outperforms the other options in terms of cost and environmental impact on a per-part basis, with AlN shown to be slightly better than SiC according to both metrics. Since it is known that AlN and SiC have superior material performance to epoxy packaging, further investigation is warranted to elucidate these relative differences, which will result in a more representative functional unit for comparative analysis.