Grant: Alliance Grants

Thales Canada designs avionic equipment for a variety of aircraft. These safety critical systems, currently implemented using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, interface to flight surfaces, landing gears, cockpit controls, etc., generating and reading analog and digital signals. Future aviation markets require flight control computers with dramatically reduced space, weight and power (SWAP). Although a custom integrated circuit (IC) drastically improves SWAP, no single transistor technology is optimal for the range of components, which includes power transistors, high-speed digital, as well as analog circuits. Using an advanced system-in-package (SiP) technology we will integrate enhanced flight control computer functionality into a significantly reduced volume. This four-year project brings together five faculty members from École de technologie supérieure, Concordia and McGill, along with a team of two post-docs, six PhD students, five MASc students and a research professional. The team has expertise in packaging, MEMS and analog and digital integrated circuit design. Through close collaboration with Thales, the team will delivery several prototypes, critical for Thales to derisk future SiP development as well as advance the state of the art in packaging, MEMS for switches and isolators, miniaturization of flight control computers, reliability and fault detection, and SiP design approaches.