Session 10: Direct Write & 3D Printing II

Inkjet printed multilayer circuit: materials and design considerations
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
1:55 PM - 2:15 PM

Inkjet printing has long been heralded as a technology to produce circuits on foils. Progress in the last decade has been relatively slow, mostly due to the fact the markets did not materialise and materials were not sufficiently developed. Of course, these two developments go hand-in-hand and it takes time before sufficient momentum is generated for the industry to boot-strap itself. In the last years we did see a significant effort in developing conductive materials at large chemical companies and applications requiring this technology are emerging. Initiatives such as NextFlex play an important role in this. While inkjet printable material combinations for realising multilayer circuits are becoming better and better, progress had been made in understanding which combinations of a dielectric ink and a conductive ink work together well. This now allows for shifting the attention from material combinations to the optimisation of the inkjet printing process and quantifying it’s capabilities in terms of trace/space widths, conductivities, layer thickness, edge roughness, etc. In this contribution we will update you on the performance of material combinations and we will elaborate on which design considerations need to be taken into account while designing a product to be realised with an inkjet printed circuit.