Ink Jet Printing Devices and Circuits
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1196-C04-03
Ink Jet Printing Devices and Circuits Steven Ready, Ana Arias, Sanjiv Sambandan and Robert Street Electronic Materials and Devices Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., Palo Alto, California.. ABSTRACT For several years there have been many efforts to employ ink jet technologies in the fabrication of consumer electronics. The potential of displacing large and expensive pieces of electronic fabrication equipment and processes with seemingly appropriately scaled inexpensive alternatives is attractive. However, of course, the devil is in the details. Feature size, accuracy, registration and materials all have sever impacts on design rules, processing, performance and the types of devices appropriate to the technology. Here we present a look at some of the materials and deposition challenges along with solutions developed at PARC. The discussion will include the defining of printed features >5µm with ±1.5µm drop placement and layer to layer alignment accuracy, the materials characteristics of the generally complex functional fluids of interest required for reliable jetting and device performance. Examples of ink jet fabricated integrated circuits, working displays, imagers and RGB color filters for LCD displays will be shared. INTRODUCTION It has been conjectured over the past several years that conventional integrated circuit (IC) fabrication methods may not be appropriate when applied to the manufacture of particular classes of devices. While conventional fabrication has been honed over decades for efficient mass production of devices consisting of massive amounts of sub-micron transistors, there are classes of device technologies which, while capable of being designed and manufactured, suffer from aspects of the entrenched IC manufacturing methods which limit ease of manufacturing as well the ability to achieve price targets. Two current examples which may significantly benefit from new and different fabrication approaches are large area electronic devices, such as wall size displays, x-ray imagers or wearable electronics, and small devices which could be mass produced beyond what is capable today as in the case of RFIDs. Our efforts toward exploring new modes of manufacturing and reducing costs have focused on advances in high resolution printing technology coupled with the maturing field of solution processable electronic materials. In particular, we have concentrated ink jet printing over other high resolution printing methods, such as microcontact, screen printing and others, due to the wide range of compatible materials and its ability to easily register successive material layers and existing structures. This does not rule out the use of potentially higher resolution patterning for the initial layer. Figure 1 compares feature size of relevant devices to the capability of several print patterning methods. The ability of inkjet printing to cover large areas while capable of producing features down to and exceeding 10um is very attractive. Potential success stories reported in the industry thus
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