Review of NordPac 2019

Organised by IMAPS Nordic in cooperation with the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society Nordic, NordPac 2019 took place from 11 to 13 June 2019 on the campus of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby. Even though the participant numbers were rather modest, the conference had many interesting contributions on offer. A total of 43 participants from 10 different countries were registered for the event. In addition, 10 companies took part in the trade exhibition, four of which were from Germany: PacTech – Packaging Technologies GmbH, DISCO, RoodMicrotec GmbH and Schott AG.

The first day of the conference consisted of two seminars, which were open to all conference participants. In the first seminar, “Humidity related issues in electronics”, the experiences of the working groups from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark were presented. The focus was mainly geared towards the corrosion of metals, which are typically used in substrates, circuit boards and electronic components. Prof. Rajan Ambat presented the basics of humidity-related failures and how to minimise them. In the second seminar, “Glasses in semicon and sensor applications”, Matthias Jotz (Schott AG) presented current and future glass-based applications in the fields of IC packaging, microbatteries, sensor technology and more.

The conference itself commenced with a plenary address and offered the audience 19 presentations on topics including sensor integration and applications, reliability, printed and flexible electronics, and medical electronics. The plenary address, “The new advanced packaging era” was delivered by E. Jan Vardaman, President of TechSearch International. She stressed that modern developments with respect to the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, 5G and autonomous driving require very high integration densities and that the importance of packaging will dramatically increase.

The next NordPac conference is expected to take place in 2022.