Electronic manufacturing 

Trends and innovations
  The electronics manufacturing industry is growing rapidly leveraging the latest technology advancements in fabrication processes and components designing. The major electronics manufacturing trends include the use of advanced materials, organic electronics, and miniaturisation. Besides, disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) play a significant role in enabling smart manufacturing practices and also, they act as the growth drivers for the industry.
    Hence, increasingly develop innovations around designing and manufacturing electronic components for high efficiency and compatibility. Similarly, 3D printing is enabling the electronics fabrication industry to become more dynamic and cost-effective. Along with organic electronics, the top electronics manufacturing trends improve the efficiency, durability, and sustainability of industrial and consumer electronics.

Impact of Electronics Manufacturing Trends
    Advanced materials are required for the fabrication process as there are limitations for the commonly used semiconductor materials to achieve miniaturisation and sustainability. Similarly, organic electronics addresses global concerns about sustainability and eco-friendly manufacturing. Electronics manufacturing employ AI and IoT in the designing, fabrication process and both technologies are also important growth drivers for the industry.
    Further, advanced circuit packaging reduces the size of a chip every year and integrates more and more functions. Because of the growing demand for flexibility and customisation of embedded systems, works on new system architectures and designs. Technologies enabling printed electronics are also gaining traction and, at the same time, 3D printing is getting a lot more attention due to its mass customisation, decentralised production, and rapid prototyping capabilities.

Advanced Materials
    The semiconductor industry has been reliant on silicon for decades, there is a limit to how far you can etch, lithograph, and pattern a silicon material. As a result, innovation to increase the performance of integrated circuits is coming from new materials and architectures. Developing silicon alternatives and other semiconductor materials or composites such as graphene, nanomaterials, GaN, and SiC for high performance and efficiency.
    Graphene nanocarbon materials for electronics fabrication.  Waterfront Graphene is capable of manufacturing and selling graphene in an amount used for fabrication. Specifically, the applications include touch panels, conductive ink, and 3D printing, supercapacitors, automobiles, thermal materials, and semiconductor.

Organic Electronics
    Organic Electronics offer massive advantages over traditional inorganic electronics. This is because they are cost-effective, flexible, indissoluble, optically transparent, lightweight, and consume low power. In addition, the rise in awareness for sustainable development and eco-friendly manufacturing attracts manufacturers to opt for organic electronics.   Also, designing circuits with microbial components or producing devices with biodegradable and recyclable materials is seen to be the next electronics manufacturing trend. Moreover, the application of organic materials to manufacture electronic devices enables electronics manufacturers to use safer, fewer, and more abundantly available raw materials. Hence, it creates new business opportunities for companies and this is sure to give them a competitive edge in the long run.
    Materials for application in various products, such as organic displays, organic lighting, and organic solar cells. Examples of materials include electron transport materials, electron injection materials, light-emitting materials, coating materials, and organic solar cell materials. Flask materials helps the device manufacturers to meet customer demands such as high efficiency, low power consumption, high reliability, as well as adaptation to next-generation materials.

Artificial Intelligence
    AI-powered solutions are gaining popularity in every sector. AI impacts the growth of semiconductor manufacturing in two ways, one is by building demand for innovative AI-capable electronics components, and two, enhancing the product manufacturing and design processes. The conventional methods have limitations to reshaping product development cycles, improving product design processes, reducing defects, and delivering products faster to the market. But application AI is solving all these limitations. The implementation of predictive maintenance in the production lines also helps manufacturers reduce downtime. Hence, artificial intelligence is one of the most important technologies among the electronics manufacturing trends.
    AI-powered engineering platform to automate all the manual steps in the engineering process. Celus platform automatically finds fitting components with the help of components information blocks available in the engineering platform. Thus, It helps to design and generate schematics and PCB-floor planning with a single click. It is also designed to fully integrate into an existing electronics manufacturing environment and automate the process from concept to design. In general, it helps manufacturers reduce product development times and complexity in the development process.

Internet of Things
    The rapid growth of the Internet of Things represents an unprecedented opportunity for the electronics manufacturing industry. It re-evaluates the fabrication process and manages practices that are found to be difficult to achieve with conventional approaches. In other ways, the IoT enables electronic manufacturing machines to self-process and store data while being digitally connected. Continuous improvements in the fabrication of sensors are also required since sensors are the key components that enable IoT applications. Further, the transition to 5G-enabled devices requires flawless, innovative chips with more efficient architectures at lower costs.
    AnalogueSmith specializes in integrated circuit design for IoT sensor nodes. Analogue and RF circuits are critical to all integrated circuits and they offer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-based integration of RF, analog, and digital functionality. This CMOS-based approach helps reduce costs without compromising on the performance requirements.

Embedded Systems
    Embedded systems are an unavoidable part of any electronic device nowadays and it has a crucial role in deciding the speed, security, size, and power of the devices. Since we are in the transition phase of a connected world, there is high demand for embedded systems. So the designing and manufacturing sector of such systems is undergoing numerous innovations to improve performance, security, and connectivity capabilities. Further, in electronics manufacturing facilities, these systems are useful for increasing machine control and monitoring.
    Luos develops an open-source and real-time orchestrator for distributed architectures to easily design, test, and deploy embedded applications. The solution encapsulates hardware and software functions as microservices. So, each microcontroller communicates with and recognises one other, but remains independent of each other. Further, offers a reusable configuration profile and offers more flexibility in the hardware development cycle.

Printed Electronics
    Printing electronics components on a semiconductor substrate is the most effective way to reduce the overall cost of the manufacturing process. So, manufacturers are always trying to tackle this challenge by searching for new technologies and advancements in conventional printing technologies. Unlike traditional semiconductors, which use tiny wires as circuits, printed electronics rely on conductive inks and often flexible films and are capable of printing anywhere. Further, the advancements in printing technologies also help the flexible hybrid electronics field to obtain enough momentum. So, developing solutions for advanced printing technologies.
    Functional inks or materials for printed electronics. Mateprincs materials specifically for the production of electronic devices using printing techniques such as inkjet, flat screen printing, slot coating, and offset lithography. Overall, their products help electronics manufacturers produce quality printed products.

Advanced IC Packaging
    In recent years, chip packaging has become a hot topic along with chip design. The traditional way to scale a device based on Moore’s law has limitations nowadays. The other way to get the benefits of scaling is to put multiple complex devices in an advanced package. So, semiconductor manufacturers develop new advanced IC packaging technologies to provide greater silicon integration in increasingly miniaturised packages. This also enables manufacturers to offer customisation and improve yields by vertically stacking modular components. Besides, advanced IC packaging optimises manufacturing to balance customer needs against overall costs.
    Assembly and packaging services for photonic integrated circuits (PICs). To make PICs a part of a photonics-enabled module, it needs to be connected to components like optical fibers, other PICs, cooling solutions, and electronics. Capable of designing and manufacturing the package in which these connections are made. PHIX helps the semiconductor industry to optimise the PIC and module design, process, and equipment, as well as scale up production.

Miniaturised Electronics
    Miniaturisation enabled the use of electronics in several novel application areas. Particularly, healthcare and automotive industry applications have space limitations in terms of implementing specific devices. Previously, the miniaturisation concept was limited by their practical handling, display, and battery, but not by the built-in electronics. So there are innovations happening to make electronics components as small as possible by maintaining speed, reliability, and efficiency. Another important aspect of miniaturisation is the integration of more and more features into a single component. For example, Nanonet sensors and Forksheet FET are a couple of recent developments in miniaturised electronic components.
    Spectricity develops miniaturised integrated spectral sensing solutions. Their patented wafer-scale hyperspectral filter technology, combined with CMOS integration processes, result in miniaturised sensors. Unlike other solutions, their filters do not require complex and bulky optics or packaging, slow scanning, or sophisticated calibration. Hence, it produces sensing devices compatible with the size, power consumption, and cost requirements of mobile devices.

Additive Manufacturing
    3D Printing in electronics manufacturing eliminates the need for flat circuit boards. It enables new innovative designs and shapes that could not have been produced through conventional means. 3D printers also fabricate electronic components as a single, continuous part, effectively creating fully functional electronics that require little or no assembly.   Consequently, the implementation of this electronics manufacturing trend speeds up the prototyping process, offers mass customisation, and benefits from decentralised parts production. In general, 3D printing technology made possible electronic components production in terms of 3D design and not only 2D, with new ways of stacking the circuits.
    ATLANT 3D Nanosystems develops atomic layer 3D printing technology, enabling materials, devices, and microsystem development and manufacturing with atomic precision. Technology capable of performing printing on simple and complex surfaces atom-by-atom. Hence, it helps multi-material, atomically precise, and highly scalable atomic layer advanced manufacturing for rapid prototyping and manufacturing of micro and nanodevices.

Immersive Technologies
    There is a high dependency on the human workforce in different stages of electronics manufacturing. So, there are possibilities for human errors, and it definitely affects the overall manufacturing efficiency. The adoption of Immersive technologies is an effective solution to overcome these challenges. Such solutions inspect design objects at all possible scales, thereby eliminating defects in products at the design stage. Specifically, they detect design errors in the circuitry as well as common manufacturing errors ranging from slivers, missing solder pads, and starved terminals, before fabrication begins. In addition, it facilitates personnel training, prototype development, assembly maintenance, and enables operators to visualise workflows before they adjust their production lines.
    Offering augmented reality software for assembly lines, the Misterine solution visually supports complicated assembly procedures with step-by-step instructions. Also, the system is interactive and the computer vision capability immediately detects errors to provide notifications to its users. Hence, it eliminates human errors, reduces the overall workload, and increases the efficiency of assembly practices.