Micro-ink-jetting of silver nanoparticles on low temperature cofired ceramic substrates for drop-on-demand metallization

摘要

The authors demonstrated the feasibility of patterning conductive inks on sintered low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) substrates using ink-jetting technology. The objective of this study is to realize drop-on-demand metallization on plain or structured ceramic substrates. The sintered LTCC substrates can be viewed as a porous ceramic medium with rough surface finishes, and its porosity is one of the major impediments for achieving high pattern quality via ink-jetting in terms of pattern uniformity and resolution. To improve the uniformity and minimize the dimension of ink-jetted patterns, the authors proposed and demonstrated three technical solutions, i.e., ink-jetting on patterned ceramic substrates, heating substrates during ink-jetting, and coating substrates with a dielectric layer. Improvement in resolution and uniformity of ink-jetting was achieved using the proposed approaches.