Manufacturing Displays and Electronics with Ink Jets

摘要

In recent years, ink jets have been shown to be useful manufacturing tools in a diverse set of applications that include production of PLED displays and PCB processing. Commercial equipment is being sold by a number of companies in Europe and Asia particularly. Light emitting polymers are available commercially as are jettable fluids for etch masking and solder resist. Overall, though, ink jets have not significantly penetrated the technical manufacturing world. Why? Success in moving ink jets as manufacturing tools into areas such as printing on to-be-defined flexible substrates or developing jettable organic semiconductors and light emitting materials requires both process and fluid research and engineering. Leading-edge concepts were explored slowly because of the lack of easy-to-use, low cost development tools. In 2005 FUJIFILM Dimatix introduced lab-scale equipment with the goal of reducing the time required to move from research and development phases into pilot and production. Such printing systems have already impacted the rate at which jettable functional fluids are formulated and evaluated. The task for the ink jet deposition industry is to build on these simple systems so as to similarly speed the movement of ink jet technology into manufacturing. This paper will discuss the status of ink jets as precision deposition tools and the new technology being introduced for ink jet manufacturing.