Industrial & Specialty Printing - July/August 2012 - 33

known color inkjet printer. Because inkjet printing is a non-contact method that digitally deposits a wide range of materials onto a wide range of substrates, the application potentially is almost unlimted. It is even possible to add functionalities on a substrate that already has electronic structures and devices, which is not possible by most contact printing. Inkjet printing is used from prototype to largevolume production with minimum to no material wastage as compared to gravure or flexographic printing. It is particularly attractive for electronic applications where the materials cost is extremely high, such as OLED materials. Today, inkjet printing is used in producing RFID to OLED display. Inkjet printing has the potential to revolutionize the way electronics are manufactured. If there is one thing that holds back the wide use of inkjet printing for electronics manufacturing it is the availability of functional inks. EmErging printing tEchniquEs Over the last few years many universities,

stamp pDms procEss stamp

molD pDms procEss mold

si a. crEatE stamp si

substrate

B. apply ink anD stamp thE suBstratE substrate
Figure 7 Microcontact printing process

substrate

research institutes and start up companis are deligently working on developing new printing technologies to meet the industry demand. Two such promising technologies are micro gravure and micrcontact

printing. Micro gravure is a relatively new printing technique based on conventional gravure printing technique. You can think of micro gravure as a reverse kiss coater.

WHAT WE MAKE IS CLEARLY CONDUCTIVE, WHAT WE DO IS A LOT MORE The ORGACONTM product line consists of coating solutions, screenand inkjet printing inks for manufacturing transparent flexible electrodes for Electroluminescent lamps, Display devices, Capacitive Touch sensors, Organic Photovoltaics, and other Printed Electronics applications. Based on a water dispersible form of the intrinsic conductive polymer PEDOT, made and applied by Agfa for over 20 years now in the permanent antistatic treatment of polyester films. ORGACON products show a unique combination of high transparency, conductivity, flexibility and processability that is not matched by other organic or inorganic conductive based-materials. www.agfa.com/orgacon

The state-of-the-art PulseForge® photonic curing tools process high-temperature materials on low-temperature substrates, and are ideal for drying, sintering, annealing, and reacting functional inks. Unlike traditional oven technologies, the patented photonic curing process selectively heats thin films to very high temperatures using microsecond-scale flash lamp pulses without damaging low temperature substrates, such as polymers and paper. Metalon® electrically conductive inks include the ICI series of copper-oxide reduction inks. After printing, the ICI inks are converted to highly-conductive thin-film copper by processing with a PulseForge tool. The ICI inks are available in print-method-specific formulations and are priced in volume at $75/kg. www.novacentrix.com 1-512-491-9500

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Industrial & Specialty Printing - July/August 2012

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