Design, Engineering and Manufacturing: all-in-one expertise serving your projects. Thales’s Competence Centre Microelectronics offers bespoke services covering the full lifecycle of products.
The activities of the microelectronics competence centre are structured around two complementary expertises serving customers’ projects: a design & development hub and a high-tech industrial tool.
These hubs are located on one single site enabling more responsive services and effective capitalization.
Our mission: anticipate and support your technological challenges to offer innovative and competitive solutions, always more reliable, resilient and sustainable.
Modular and innovative technological bricks serving all critical environments
The R&D department is centred on a design office and two areas of expertise working in close partnership: a team of hardware electronic designers specialized in harsh environments and a team of experts in packaging & interconnections developments.
Application fields of the hardware electronics design team:
- Power electronics
- Analogue and digital electronics
- LF and microwave electronics
Our experts develop multi-chip modules and technological bricks that can be easily combined, adapted and replaced in order to best fit the system’s requirements and upgrades. They notably focus on:
- Power bricks : power density and thermal monitoring
- Analogue and digital bricks: function densification
- Microwave bricks: power density and function densification
Application fields in packaging and interconnections:
- Electronics bonding and assembly technologies
- Electronics packaging technologies
Our experts develop disruptive materials, layout or assembly solutions in order to optimize the dimensions, cost, performance or even the reproducibility of the products and processes. In parallel, the teams are involved in numerous upstream research programmes, whether within consortiums, or together with university laboratories and European research institutes.
Related toolings:
- Specific analytical equipment: MEB, DSC/TGA/TMA (Tg) analysis, RX, X-ray fluorescence, pull and shearing tests, traction tests, acoustic microscope, Dage…
- Design Office : placement and routing of Multi-Chip Modules and PCBA, thermal and electro-mechanical simulations, 3D mechanical design, assembly and test tooling
Thales’s microelectronics competence centre: 6,700m2 dedicated to technology at its best, from System-in-Package to embedded system.
- Clean rooms from class 6 to 8
- Over 40-year background in microelectronics and microwaves
- Small and medium production runs
- Rapid mock-up and prototyping services
- Electrical, functional and screening testing equipment
- In-house training centre for microelectronics assemblies
Located at Etrelles in Brittany, the competence centre in microelectronics embraces all manufacturing resources: development and analytical laboratories, clean rooms for assembly and integration (including classified premises) as well as cutting-edge simulation and characterization equipment.
Our know-how relies both on highly-qualified and experienced personnel for specific manual operations, and a comprehensive range of equipment enabling us to adapt each manufacturing process to the required technology.
In-house Supply Chain
Our in-house Supply Chain capacities mean that we can manage all the flows linked to a contract. We work with all parties involved in logistical chain in order to maintain the competitiveness of your products and their availability on the market. This overall management provides you with a clear and global picture of your products’ total cost of ownership.
Operational scope
- Selecting, qualifying and managing suppliers in France and internationally
- Managing defence-classified imports and exports of equipment
- Obsolescence tracking and monitoring
- Traceability management
Clean room class 6 to 7: Equipment & Processes
- Microelectronics automated assembly lines
- High-temperature brazing process
- Microelectronics manual expertise : assembly, integration and test
- Hermetic sealing equipment
- Screening equipment
- Microwave testing equipment
Typology of products
- Multi-chip modules and hybrids
- High-density and 3D-packaging
- Microwave sub-carriers
Clean room class 8: Equipment & Processes
- High-density SMT assembly lines
- Low-void brazing process
- Electrical, functional, HV and VHV testing facilities
- Screening equipment
- Integration of systems
Typology of products
- Equipped casing and sub-systems
- High-density mixed technologies PCBA
- Radar transmitters
- Communication systems