Vertical Pattern of Interconnects to Bypass High Strain Near a Hard Die on a Flexible Substrate Under Mechanical Bending

The distinguishing feature of a flexible electronic device is that it maintains its function even when the shape changes repeatedly. As the degree of integration of flexible devices increases, revealing failure mechanisms and extending the lifetime of the flexible devices are getting more difficult. One of the potential damage zones is the interface of heterogeneous material components, where strain can be localized due to the mismatch of mechanical properties. In this study, we investigate the mechanically reliable interconnect design of the flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) system in which the packaging chip is integrated. When the FPCB was bent, folding occurred at the edge of the packaging chip due to the high bending rigidity compared with the plastic substrate and resulted in high strain concentration. By introducing interconnect architecture that bypassed the strain concentration area around the packaging chip, mechanical damage of the interconnects was successfully reduced. Through finite element simulation, the strain applied to the interconnect crossing the strain-concentrated region was predicted to be 2 times larger than that bypassing the strain-concentrated region, from 8.32 to 4.64%. In addition, the strain gap of these two interconnects could be increased as the Young’s modulus mismatch between the packaging chip and the substrate increased. This study is expected to improve the design guidelines to mechanically reliable interconnects in highly integrated flexible electronics. Graphical Abstract