Lockheed Martin | Flex Integration for Edge Computing

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Isaac Leffler
To achieve the advanced electronics requirements of many defense applications and systems there is a demand for the use of heterogenous solutions that can integrate a variety of semiconductor chiplets onto conformal surfaces. The leading representative examples include missiles and Group 1 unmanned platforms. An increasing number of platforms are similarly moving toward these requirements, particularly with the migration to converged sensing architectures in which the electronics are located very near the RF and EOIR sensors.
Examples of the type of Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE) that is needed for edge sensing and computing in defense applications include the following types of advanced electronics:
· RF mixed signal sensor front end electronics (antenna, RF, filters, channelizer)
· Small Signal Power (SSP) Point-of-Load (PoL) power management
· Sensor signal processing including AI/ML algorithms.
· Computation for backend processing (data fusion, object detection/recognition)
· Optical interconnects to transport RF sensor data more efficiently.
While the long-term solution requires many heterogenous chiplets integrated into a common system-in-package (SiP), current efforts focus on a discriminating subset of the key challenges by integrating a single mixed-bump, high-performance data converter die onto an FHE substrate. By doing so, it will demonstrate the FHE advanced electronics manufacturing, assembly, and packaging build, with process steps for 1) assembly and alignment of high-density die at 55um and 150um bump pitch devices, 2) high-speed RF and digital signal handling, 3) electrical connectivity via flip-chip, and 4) reliability testing of the packaged solution.
Past efforts have also targeted optical RF interconnects for more efficient transport of sensor data by building an RFoF PIC system for long distance fiber backhaul to replace existing RF cabling systems. These systems improve and normalize sensor data across larger aperture antenna arrays bringing life back to edge array elements previously experiencing exceptionally high RF losses.