Large Area Processing and Patterning with Ink Jet Technology
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1030-G02-09
Large Area Processing and Patterning with Ink Jet Technology Michael Grove1, Donal Hayes2, and Virang Shah2 1 Chemistry, MicroFab Technologies, Inc., 1104 Summit Ave., Suite 110, Plano, TX, 75074 2 MicroFab Technologies, Inc., 1104 Summit Ave., Ste 110, Plano, TX, 75074 ABSTRACT Patterning materials over large areas on flexible plastic or metal substrates, and on rigid ones, where multiple layers of different materials are being applied in order to create active devices brings with it the real challenge of accurate materials placement [1]. The additive process of printing expensive functional materials reduces costs associated with the losses of subtractive processing, but focuses the technological necessity on the precision of materials alignments on the target substrates. During the past decade, both materials and their print processing have developed to a near commercial level for optical and electronic devices. Industrial success will be assured when their production enjoys the economies of scale that large area processing can bring. Ink jet technology has developed in the last twenty-five years to a level of sophistication that is now adequate for the challenges of processing large area substrates for optical and electronic devices. Some equipment and processing will be covered in this paper.
INTRODUCTION While large area processing usually brings plastic substrates' dimensional problems to mind, large glass panels used in LCDs, for example, are not completely rigid and need careful handling. As LCD fabs have gone to larger glass sizes, deletions that occur during screen print processing, which would normally mean loss of yield, are now recovered, in some cases, by quietly ink jet printing the missing materials. Because of current ink jet production of large area billboard-size prints on plastic substrates, and multi-meter wide ink jet printed textiles, especially silk, it is reasonable to examine the application of ink jet printing to the manufacture of large area optical and electronic devices on panels or rolls. Ink jet billboard printing and large area textile printing enjoy an advantage over electronic device printing as in their case inks are being printed onto a blank surface while organic electronic or optical devices normally must typically be aligned with structures already fabricated on the substrate. An example being antennae for RFID devices. The optical engineering technology and recognition software to enable that precision of alignment, however, does exist. If the substrate is originally equipped with a set of fiduciary marks, or is so imprinted during the placement of an initial device or feature, current precision optical inspection and recognition equipment can feed that data into an automated ink jet printing system, even if the substrate has become distorted during processing The critical components of the printing system, however, which are basically an aligned set of ink jet print heads and the precision motion system of substrate and/or printheads, will need to be somewhat
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