STTR Phase I: Low Temperature Cofired Multilayer Ceramic Power Transformers Incorporating Base Metallization Materials

该项目的广泛影响/商业潜力包括电源、逆变器负载点(POL)电源设备、电压隔离器和电压传感器。EMI/RFI免疫的高热操作和非常高的抗辐射能力使医疗、空间、国防和能源勘探领域的全新电子设计解决方案成为可能。这项提议的新技术将是商业太阳能的分布式POL解决方案、移动/便携式电子产品的高性能适配器和转换器、机器人集成超小型电源的理想选择。这一成功还将为NASA等机构和商业航天公司提供新的能力，以集成一种新的超小型解决方案，将市电母线电力转换到所有子系统，其辐射和高温耐受性远远超过以往任何产品。这是小卫星/立方体卫星(微型卫星)社区特别感兴趣的。更高性能的执行器和换能器设备的制造也将带来附带好处，通过使用价格显著降低的铜材料，这些设备将显著降低成本。这个小型企业技术转移研究(STTR)第一阶段项目将解决实现高功率/高性能陶瓷变压器的挑战，以取代传统的磁性材料。用陶瓷代替磁性变压器可以使许多电子应用受益。优点包括大幅提高安全工作温度，大幅减少电磁/射频干扰(EMI/RFI)问题，以及减小尺寸/重量。目前，还不存在这样的变压器。任何解决方案都需要多层结构；然而，对于变压器来说，这在电子工艺工程中带来了一些困难和未解决的挑战，这些挑战不是多层陶瓷电容器、压电致动器和压电传感器制造的问题。这些新的挑战包括，多层结构现在必须实现每层的单独极化；由于变压器设备必须在谐振状态下运行，它们现在产生的热能水平要高得多，需要大幅改进热管理(电极电/热传导)；还需要用低损耗的硬质陶瓷取代软质陶瓷。铜在电/热传导方面具有非常优异的性能，但需要极低的工艺温度，这对于烧结硬质陶瓷来说是很难实现的，但成功地提供了巨大的回报。这项研究将探索一种新的低温工艺的有前景的方法，该工艺使用新的掺杂化学物质和有利的铜电极。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to a wide range of electronics as to include power supplies, inverters point-of-load (POL) power devices, voltage isolators and voltage sensors. The high thermal operation that is EMI/RFI immune and very rad hard enables completely new electronics design solutions for medical, space, defense, and energy exploration. This new technology proposed will be ideal for distributed POL solutions for commercial solar energy, high performance adaptors and converters for mobile/portable electronics, robotic integrated subcompact power supplies. The success will also open up new capabilities for agencies such as NASA, and commercial space companies to integrate a new subcompact solution for converting mains bus power to all of the subsystems that is far more radiation and high temperature tolerant than anything ever previously available. This is of particular interest to the SmallSat/CubeSat (miniaturized satellite) community. There will also be spin-off benefits to manufacturing of higher performance actuators and transducer devices that will see significant decreased costs through use of significantly less expensive copper materials.This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project will address the challenge of enabling high power/high performance ceramic transformers that replaces conventional magnetics. Many electronics applications can benefit from replacing magnetic transformer with ceramics. Advantages include large increase in safe operating temperatures, drastically reducing the electromagnetic/radio frequency interference (EMI/RFI) issues, and reducing the size/weight. At present, no such transformers exist. Any solution will require multilayer construction; however, for transformers this introduces several difficult and unsolved challenges in electronics process engineering that are not issues for multilayer ceramic capacitors, piezoelectric actuators and piezoelectric sensors manufacture. These new challenges include that the multilayer construction must now enable individual poling of each layer; because transformer devices must operate at resonance they now generate much greater levels of thermal energy requiring drastically improved thermal management (electrode electrical/thermal conduction); also requires replacing soft ceramic with low loss hard ceramic. Copper introduces very superior properties in electrical/thermal conduction but requires significantly lower process temperatures that will be challenging to achieve for sintered hard ceramic but offers enormous pay-off with success. The research will investigate the promising approach of a new low temperature process that uses new doping chemistries and advantageous copper electroding.