The characteristics of silver inkjet printing were intensively investigated with control of surface energy and substrate temperature. A fluorocarbon (FC) film was spincoated on a silicon (Si) substrate to obtain a hydrophobic surface, and an ultraviolet (UV)/ozone (O 3 ) treatment was performed to control the surface wettability of the FC film surface. To characterize the surface changes, we performed measurements of the static and dynamic contact angles and calculated the surface energy by Wu's harmonic mean model. The surface energy of the FC film increased with the UV/O 3 treatment time, while the contact angles decreased. In silver inkjet printing, the hydrophobic FC film could reduce the diameter of the printed droplets. Merging of deposited droplets was observed when the substrate was kept at room temperature. Substrate heating was effective in preventing the merging phenomenon among the deposited droplets, and in reducing the width of printed lines. The merging phenomenon of deposited droplets was also prevented by increasing the UV/O 3 treatment time. Continuous silver lines in the width range of 48.04-139.21 µm were successfully achieved by inkjet printing on the UV/O 3 -treated hydrophobic FC films at substrate temperatures below 90 • C.

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In printed electronics applications, specific resistances of conductive lines are critical to the performance of the devices. The specific resistance of a silver (Ag) nanoparticle electrode is affected by surface morphology of the layered nanoparticles which were sintered by the heat treatment after printing. In this work, the relationship between surface morphology and specific resistance was investigated with various sintering temperatures and various layer thicknesses of Ag nanoparticle ink. Ag nanoparticles with an average size of approximately 50 nm were spin-coated on Eagle XG glass substrates with various spin speed to change the layer thickness of Ag nanoparticles from 200 nm to 900 nm. Coated Ag nanoparticle layers were heated from 150°C to 450°C for 30 min in a furnace. The result showed that higher sintering temperature produces larger grains in an Ag layer and decreases specific resistance of the layer, but that the maximum allowable heating temperature is limited by the thickness of the layer. When grain size exceeded the thickness of the layer, the morphology of the Ag nanoparticles changed to submicronsized islands and the Ag layers did not have electrical conductivity any more.

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