eurstars™ inkjetPCB

inkjetPCB

Inkjet-based fabrication of multilayer printed circuit boards with embedded printed passive elements. Project duration: 11/2019 – 10/2021

Standard PCB industrial manufacturing process

Complex, multi-stage, material intensive, costly, high waste production, environmentally aggressive, SUBTRACTIVE.

inkjetPCB

Cheaper in terms of processing operations, materials involved, capital investment, workforce employed, waste management.
Potentially faster (exploiting high throughput equipment).
Increased functionalities: flexibility, passive component embedding, reduced dishomogeneities deriving from plating and etching high or low density patterned areas, etc.
The low capex allows high parallelization in order to increase the throughput.
Environmentally friendly: no hazardous material employed, additive manufacturing.
Drastic reduction of factory floor plan area from 200m2 in the current state-of-the-art process to 60m2 maintaining the same throughput.
Digital advantages: product singularization, smart production planning, change on the fly, cheap and fast prototyping.
Non-contact process: embedding of PCBs onto 3D objects, printing of fragile substrates.

Project objectives and envisaged results

Partners & Roles

Materials: conductive and dielectric inks

Solvent-based metallic inks, from the ink family Sicrys™, as material for conductive lines, contact pads, ground planes and resistors. Copper and Silver inks.
UV curable conductive inks under development by PVN for printing high aspect ratio structures, based on silver and copper NPs embedded in a UV curable matrix.
UV and thermally curable dielectric inks will be selected and optimized during the project to ensure they meet the expected requirements in terms of printability, electrical and mechanical properties:

                - Enhanced acrylic-based dielectric ink
                - High performance polyimide dielectric ink
                - High-k BaTiO3 ink for passive components

Printers: prototyping and production equipment

Large area printing: Standard PCB panel size
Multiple materials
Multiple printheads

                - Mixed resolutions capabilities for dielectric and
                   conductive features
                - Minimum conductive feature size <50µm

Throughput enhancement techniques
Additional hardware integration

                - IR drying
                - UV curing
                - NIR laser sintering
                - Vision and inspection system

Compatibility with GDS or Gerber files for 3D PCB printing
Implementation of missing software features (Embedded components design, Multi thickness lines)