TINKER-FABRICATION OF SENSOR PACKAGES ENABLED BY ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

Autonomous driving and self-driving cars represent one prominent example for the use of
microelectronics and sensor, most importantly RADAR and LIDAR sensors. Their respective
markets have a big potential, e.g. it is estimated that the market size of LIDAR in automotive will
double itself in the next two years (within 2020 to 2022). The public awareness and the industrial
need for further miniaturization of such sensor packages is the main driver of ongoing efforts in
the automotive sector to be able to integrate such devices into the car body like in the bumps and
head lamps instead of attaching them (e.g. on top of the car in case of LIDAR device). Safety (for
the driver and others) is the most important key aspect of the automotive sector. Therefore
highly-value and high performance RADAR and LIDAR systems are required for advanced driver-
assistance systems (ADAS) as well as robotic cars. Current bottlenecks are relevantly large size of
such sensor devices, their weight and power consumption. Since these factors are highly limited
within cars, further miniaturization and improving functionality and efficient use of resources is
highly demanded.

In the period of 3 years, European Union’s H2020 funded TINKER project is set to develop a new
reliable, accurate, functional, cost- and resource efficient pathway for RADAR and LIDAR sensor
package fabrication, following 2 mail objectives: Establishing the TINKER platform based on
Additive Manufacturing (AM) and Fabrication of RADAR and LIDAR sensor packages as use cases.
TINKER’s approaches to use “key enabling technologies, especially inkjet printing and nanoimprint
lithography”, as a disruptive and flexible manufacturing techniques in micro-part assembling is in
alliance with the overall scope of the call Transforming European Industry. The TINKER pilot
represents a high degree of flexibility and reliability due to its modular character.

Start date: 1 October 2020
End date: 30 September 2023