Materials Center Leoben Forschung
The Materials Center Leoben Forschung GmbH (MCL) is a leading Austrian research institution specializing in materials science, materials engineering, and innovative materials applications.
Core Mission and Focus:
MCL is dedicated to advancing materials research through a combination of scientific excellence and industrial collaboration. Its mission is to develop and apply cutting-edge materials technologies that support innovation across sectors such as mobility, energy, electronics, and manufacturing. MCL’s work spans a wide range of disciplines, including:
- Materials development and characterization
- Simulation and modeling of materials and processes
- Powder metallurgy and surface technologies
- Joining technologies and microelectronics
- Damage analysis and predictive health monitoring
Role
The E2PACKMAN project aims at pushing the boundaries of heterogeneous integrated electronic systems. This includes their miniaturization; improving related design and modeling capabilities as well as automating production processes; and enhancing their quality and reliability. As a key member of the E2PACKMAN consortium, MCL contributes its deep expertise in materials science with a focus on advanced electronics packaging.
MCL’s technical contributions include conducting materials analytics, thermo-physical assessments, and correlative microscopy on high-density interconnect of packaged devices. The team will evaluate innovative materials for heterogeneous integration, packaging, and assembly. One focus of the MCL will be the development of a specialized setup for electrical impedance measurements on substrates to assess interconnect materials.
In addition to these technical contributions, MCL will serve as co-leader of Work Package 3 (Materials & Interfaces), guiding its strategic development and ensuring the successful implementation of this essential project segment.
Key Contribution
MCL’s key contribution to the E2PACKMAN project lies in the development of a comprehensive toolset aligned with the “design for reliability” methodology. This toolset will address major challenges such as size, fragility, and complexity of heterogeneous dies and chiplets — each containing hundreds to thousands of micro-joints — as well as large-area ball-grid arrays (BGA) components with rising power densities, and demanding service conditions in high-performance computing environments.
To meet these challenges, MCL will design an electrical impedance measurement setup that supports model-based development and qualification of reliable chiplet interconnects. In parallel, MCL will advance analytical methods to investigate the thermal, electrical, and electro-thermal behavior of materials used in next-generation packaging technologies.
A central goal of the E2PACKMAN is to deliver packaging concepts that surpass the current state-of-the-art. This requires a scale-bridging approach and metrologies capable of capturing material behavior under real-world functional conditions. MCL will apply thermal, thermo-electrical, and structural analysis techniques to generate multi-dimensional insights into the physical properties of materials and interfaces.
Ultimately, MCL aims to deliver an advanced materials characterization toolset that integrates diverse physical property analyses into a unified framework for reliability-driven design.
