Inkjet Printing and Alternative Sintering of Narrow Conductive Tracks on Flexible Substrates for Plastic Electronic Applications

Inkjet Printing of Microcomponents: Theory, Design, Characteristics and Applications

“…Because of the need for fusing the nanoparticles, those inkjet print of metal inks typically feature a sintering process at elevated temperature (> 100 °C) to reduce their porous portions of structure, in which the resistivity of printed materials can be as low as 5-7×10 -6 Ωcm (Scandurra et al 2010). Furthermore, this type of conductive elements can be commonly applied in flexible microelectronics that has been attracting many efforts in recent years (Perelaer & Schubert, 2010). As demonstrated in Figure 11, the conductive Ag (silver) lines and electrodes can be directly inkjet printed and sintered on a flexible PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) substrate using a commercial Dimatix material printer (DMP 2800).…”

“…Based on the this kind of application, more persisting efforts were made within recent years about the improvement of ink formulas (Kim et al, 2009;Chang et al, 2011), surface treatments and characteristics (Koo et al, 2005;Chen et al, 2010), and large-area and active lighting (Bale et al, 2006). In a similar development way, more extensive studies for inkjet printing applications were also directed to other fields including biochips (Xu et al, 2005;Gutmann et al, 2005), optical microlenses (Nallani et al, 2006;Chen et al, 2009), microelectromechanical systems (Fuller et al, 2002;Cho et al, 2006;Alfeeli et al, 2008), and electronic components (Lee et al, 2005;Scandurra et al, 2010;Perelaer et al, 2010). Among them, many of the fundamental processes (e.g., surface treatments and droplet depositions) and components (e.g., inkjetprinted polymers and conductors) are in common with the present display applications, in particular the polymer light-emitting and liquid crystal displays (Katayama, 1999;Mentley, 2002;van der Vaart et al, 2005).…”

Inkjet printing technology for polymer thermal conductivity measurement by the three omega method

“…When applying such technology, the metal-based ink is directly printed onto the substrate where no chemical and solvent application is required and no mask patterning is needed. In this way, the number of processing steps and the amount of material used is reduced, which implies reduction of time, cost and waste [17]. It is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that the three omega method has been associated with inkjet printing technology for the measurement of thermal conductivity of polymers.…”

Lateral multijunction photovoltaic cells

“…should be sufficient for the destruction of organic additives that protect the nanoparticles from coagulation, and sufficient to stimulate association of nanoparticles in a continuous layer of metal, semiconductor or insulator [49,50]. Sintering can be performed by thermal heating, heating layer structure of laser light [17,51], high temperature radio frequency plasma, by passing an electric current [17,50,52].…”

“…Sintering can be performed by thermal heating, heating layer structure of laser light [17,51], high temperature radio frequency plasma, by passing an electric current [17,50,52].…”