Additively Manufactured Dissolvable Electronics Packaging for Sustainability

As the prevalence of electronics increases and their lifespan decreases, the volume of electronic waste (E-waste) continues to grow. Recycling E-waste poses challenges due to the intricate nature of electronics and their packaging, making it difficult to retrieve components for reuse. While there has been research into sustainable materials for electronics, sustainable integrated circuit (IC) packaging has remained unexplored. This research presents a new method that involves using dissolvable materials made through additive manufacturing for IC packaging, aimed at recovering bare-die chips from used electronics. Two recyclable polymer materials, Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), are employed and fabricated using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) based 3D printing. Under optimal dissolving conditions, chip recovery takes less than 12 minutes for PVA and 2 minutes for ABS. Performance tests conducted after retrieval show no compromise in functionality in terms of clock frequency and power consumption. This approach presents a sustainable packaging solution for commercial electronic chips that matches the performance of conventional packaging methods.