Company: CPSH
Filing Date: 2025-03-17
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001437749-25-008029
Chunk: 2

Company: CPS TECHNOLOGIES CORP/DE/
Filing Date: 2025-03-17
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 2
---
 closer together; and at the system level, higher density circuit boards are being assembled closer together. Silicon carbide chips are slowly replacing silicon chips due to their higher efficiency. Silicon carbide chips run at higher temperatures than silicon chips, furthering the need for proper thermal management.

The designer must resolve the thermal management issues or the system will fail. For every 10 degree Celsius rise in temperature above a threshold level, the reliability of an integrated circuit is decreased by approximately half. In addition, heat usually causes changes in parameters which degrade the performance of both active and passive electronic components.

To resolve thermal management issues, the designer is primarily concerned with two properties of the materials which comprise the system: 1) thermal conductivity, which is the rate at which heat moves through materials, and 2) thermal expansion rate (Coefficient of Thermal Expansion or CTE), which is the rate at which materials expand or contract as temperature changes. The designer must ensure that the temperature of an electronic assembly stays within a range that ensures that the expansion rates of the materials in the assembly do not result in a failure due to breaking, delaminating, or related causes.

CPS combines at the microstructural level a ceramic with a metal to produce a metal matrix composite which has the thermal conductivity needed to remove heat, and a thermal expansion rate which is sufficiently close to other components in the assembly to ensure the assembly is reliable. Typically the ceramic is silicon carbide (SiC), the metal is aluminum (Al), and the composite is aluminum silicon carbide (AlSiC), a metal-matrix composite. CPS can adjust the thermal expansion rate of AlSiC components to match the specific application by modifying the amount of SiC compared to the amount of Al in the component.

CPS produces products made of AlSiC in the shapes and configurations required for each application, for example, in the form of lids, substrates, housings, etc. Every product is made to a customer’s specifications. The CPS process technology allows most products to be made to net shape, requiring little or no final machining.

The Company primarily manufactures MMC components comprised of AlSiC. Nevertheless, its proprietary Quickset- Quickcast process technology can be used to produce other MMCs to meet market requirements. For example, CPS combines aluminum with other ceramic or metal components such as ceramic fibers, tungsten and boron carbide.

An important development in power processing is the emergence of wide-band gap semiconductors, particularly SiC semiconductors. SiC chips are more efficient