Abstract

Printing technologies such as Aerosol Jet provides the freedom of miniaturizing interconnects and producing fine pitch components. Aerosol Jet, a direct printing technique replaces the traditional steps of manufacturing a printed circuit board such as lithography or etching, which are quite expensive, and further allowing the circuits to be fabricated onto all kinds of substrates. Wide impact areas range from healthcare to wearables to future automotive applications. The aerosol jet printer from Optomec utilized in this study, consists of two types of atomizers depending on ink viscosity. One is Ultrasonic Atomizer which supports ink with viscosity range of 1–5cP, and another is Pneumatic Atomizer with large range of suitable viscosity 1–1000cP. This paper focuses on utilizing the aerosol jet printing using both the atomizers to develop process parameters to be able to successfully print bi-material, multi-layer circuitry. The insulating material between two conductive lines used in the paper is of very high viscosity of 350cP, suitable for Pneumatic atomizer and Silver Nano-particle ink with the viscosity suitable for Ultrasonic atomizer as a conductive ink. A statistical modeling approach is presented to predict the attributes such as micro-via diameter before starting the print process, enabling us to pre-adjust the dimensions in CAD for the desired output. Process parameters to obtain a fine print with good electrical properties and better dimensional accuracy are developed. Importance of pre-cleaning the substrate is discussed, in addition to the printing process efficiency gauged as a function of process capability index and process capability ratio.

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