Miniature Electronic Circuits

Extending it’s Mill and Fill technology for fabrication of high density electronic interconnect circuits, Potomac has developed techniques for mounting miniature active and passive components to produce functional electronic circuits of reduced size. This new capability can produce size and cost reductions in medical devices, sensing systems and networks, and military/homeland security applications.

The Potomac Mill and Fill approach produces embedded silver conductors and can be applied to a variety of popular substrates. Line widths and feature spacing can be as small as 12 microns. The use of small, embedded conductors allows novel routing techniques to be used to minimize layer count and is compatible with almost any SMT component package. A very simple example of the technology is the LED flasher circuit shown in the photograph. The circuit comprises a small dual inverter IC, two capacitors and an LED in 0402 packages, and three resistors in 0201 packages. The overall width of the circuit is approximately 3 mm. Novel routing of the small embedded conductors allows fabrication of the entire circuit on a single-layer Al2O3 substrate.