Package design for alleviating stress in materials embedded with electronic systems

Recent advances in system miniaturisation have led to the development of a multitude of new sophisticated multifunctional electronics. Efficient application of these devices to creating smart objects by embedding digital systems into materials is currently hampered by challenges posed by the system integration and packaging. High stresses induced by the embedded packaged systems are particularly detrimental to the host materials' integrity and cause significant degradation and failure of the host material. This in turn affects the performance and reliability of the host materials and, ultimately, smart objects. Therefore, new packaging design solutions are required to ensure an unobtrusive low-stress integration of packaged electronic systems in materials and objects. This work approaches the challenge as a package-in-a-package problem; that is a packaged electronics system encapsulated into a host material. Through simulation and experiments, it investigates effects of embedded packages on the bulk host materials and discovers package design guidelines for low-stress integration of electronics into smart objects.