Fully inkjet-printed microwave passive electronics

Abstract

Fully inkjet-printed three-dimensional (3D) objects with integrated metal provide exciting possibilities for on-demand fabrication of radio frequency electronics such as inductors, capacitors, and filters. To date, there have been several reports of printed radio frequency components metallized via the use of plating solutions, sputtering, and low-conductivity pastes. These metallization techniques require rather complex fabrication, and do not provide an easily integrated or versatile process. This work utilizes a novel silver ink cured with a low-cost infrared lamp at only 80°C, and achieves a high conductivity of 1 × 10 7 S m −1. By inkjet printing the infrared-cured silver together with a commercial 3D inkjet ultraviolet-cured acrylic dielectric, a multilayer process is demonstrated. By using a smoothing technique, both the conductive ink and dielectric provide surface roughness values of o500 nm. A radio frequency inductor and capacitor exhibit state-of-the-art quality factors of 8 and 20, respectively, and match well with electromagnetic simulations. These components are implemented in a lumped element radio frequency filter with an impressive insertion loss of 0.8 dB at 1 GHz, proving the utility of the process for sensitive radio frequency applications.

Fully Inkjet‐Printed VO2‐Based Radio‐Frequency Switches for Flexible Reconfigurable Components

“…In contrast to the above‐mentioned subtractive technologies, additive manufacturing techniques (inkjet, screen, and 3D printing) offer extremely low cost, completely digital, and highly scalable manufacturing processes . Due to these advantages, additive manufacturing techniques have been used to realize sensors, transistors, RF inductors, RF capacitors, RF filters, RF identification (RFID) tags, and so on. There have only been a few reports on printed RF switches .…”

Precursors for Atmospheric Plasma‐Enhanced Sintering: Low‐Temperature Inkjet Printing of Conductive Copper

“…30 min, 300 °C) of the complexes reported are high. In most cases, thermal sintering has been used to form conductive copper; however, it should be noted that using UV or microwave irradiation, an argon ion LASER beam, low‐pressure plasma, or pulse electric current has also previously been reported. In particular, Farraj et al.…”

Printable Materials for the Realization of High Performance RF Components: Challenges and Opportunities

“…One approach to reduce roughness of printed dielectric substrates is to follow with printing a more conformal dielectric material, which spreads over the rough substrate surface before UV cure. After UV curing, the conformal dielectric material substrate surface roughness can be reduced to a few submicron RMS roughness [78].…”