TABLE OF CONTENTS J.Lyke, W.G.Wilson and J.W.Tringe
This chapter highlights some of the unique challenges and opportunities afforded by aerospace systems. Reliability has always been a concern in these high-consequence systems. As early adopters of hybrid packaging, aerospace systems have often become pathfinders, uncovering reliability problems and defining standards for environmental qualifications often adopted in other application sectors. The quest for high performance involves pressing the envelope in ways that might provide a unique military advantage. For example, making sensors function in places or settings previously believed impossible, such as within the extreme heat of a jet engine or the intense shock of a wing-mounted cannon.
This chapter focuses on the special attributes associated with aerospace systems, environments and the types of packaging technologies that have evolved to address a number of relevant applications. A number of simple taxonomies are presented for these systems and related packaging approaches. As aerospace systems tend to be in some sense performance driven, robust and integrated packaging schemes have usually been preferred, and research programmes have introduced a number of related concepts. Some of these concepts, including multichip module and 3D packaging schemes, are reviewed here, as they are relevant to potential applications involving the integration of MEMS devices.
