Interconnection Group, Loughborough University

Business foci

One of the major issues in electronics assembly by multinational enterprises is the choice of where that assembly is carried out. The group has focused on understanding the issues around the location and growth of inward investments into East Asia, including China, Taiwan and Singapore.

Work to date has concentrated on R&D capability growth, manufacturing capability measurement and methodology development for work in the globalisation area. This work has been particularly driven by the needs of Scottish Enterprise to benchmark its own electronics cluster against that of other competing regions and strongly links business and technological issues. Complimentary work now seeks to understand the scale and location of the UK electronics industry and the impact of technology trends on this industry.

e-medic seeks to explore the technological and business potential of integrating advanced electronics and information technologies with improved drug formulations into non-invasive drug delivery devices, and their exploitation to maximum benefit in healthcare. A platform device is researched based upon a pulmonary delivery system that is flexible, programmable, and potentially will provide remote patient monitoring through a distributed healthcare information system.

This project focuses on the development of a lead-free joining technology using metal droplets. Technological developments must not overlook environmental health and safety concerns. Traditional joining methods have often used solders of Pb-Sn composition, which are now intended to be phased out. Thus, novel processing methods must be sought to overcome this problem and provide a cleaner more effective solution.