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Wearable electronic textiles are a demanding environment for reliable interconnects – the ability to function with movement and survive multiple cleanings and reuse. Good adhesion is particularly challenging in these wearable and conformable electronics applications. While solders provide the most conductive electrical connection, they are rigid and require not only the addition of an underfill adhesive but usually a post bond encapsulation. This Anisotropic Conductive Epoxy, provides reliable interconnections between electronic components and circuitry on textiles with excellent structural bonding, without encapsulation, even under repeated stretching and washings. This technology has been shown as a scalable assembly process for e-Textile manufacturing in an SMT line.
Will copper nanoparticle inks finally come of age to disrupt the dominance of silver in the conductive paste business?
Cost of production has been a major barrier despite the fact that Cu raw material prices are far lower than Ag. This is because this large raw material cost difference does not often get translated into equally large nanoparticle dispersion or ink costs. Can this be overcome?
The progress of screen printing towards fine line printing has been incredible going from 100 µm features before 2010 to 70 µm to 2015 to 40 µm in 2018 and now pushing - in development- towards 20 µm and less. In parallel, the wet thickness of the printed line have gone down from 12um or so in 2018 to now just 4um.
As microLEDs inevitably shrink in size, the micro-bumping requirements for the microLED dies becomes more challenging. Direct wafer-based printing based on gravure offset techniques offers a promising solution in this regard. Indeed, this is another field where printed electronics can play a role.
The three themes are closely linked since QDs can be digitally printed as color conversation materials atop blue microLEDs to enable wide color gamut RGB uLED displays without requiring a separate transfer step for each color.. This is an important technology as it simplifies the manufacturing step for microLED and thus removing a major hinderence.