A Precise Position Measurement System of Roll-to-Roll Printing Using Burst Alignment Patterns

Printed electronics is a next-generation process technology that is suitable for high speed and high volume production and can make electronic devices and circuits on flexible materials. To commercialize printed electronics, it is necessary to improve the alignment precision of printing. In order to improve the alignment precision of the roll-to-roll process, accurate measurement of the web position is required. Therefore, in the previous research of this paper, we proposed a measurement system of the moving direction and the lateral movement using an encoder. However, in the previous study, the direction of error control had to be set according to the measurement position of the encoder, and the measurement range was so narrow. In this paper, we propose a measurement system that can detect the direction of error and increase the effective measurement range using the burst alignment pattern that generates the burst signal. Applying it to roll-to-roll printing position measurement systems, measurements can be performed with greatly improved efficiency and measurement range.