A Combined Process of Liftoff and Printing for the Fabrication of Scalable Inkjet Printed Microstructures on a Flexible Substrate

Abstract

In this paper, a combined process of liftoff and printing (CPLoP) techniques is introduced to realize size-scalable printed silver microstructures with line widths ranging from 5 to 70 mu m and resistivities of similar to 9.8 mu Omega . cm on a flexible polyimide substrate via thermal sintering at 300 degrees C for 30 min. In addition, a printed interdigitated capacitor with an electrode line width and spacing of 10 mu m and a printed spiral square inductor with a 10-mu m line width and 5-mu m spacing in an area of 1 mm(2) have been successfully demonstrated with an area capacitance and inductance of 0.43 pF/mm(2) at 10 KHz and 1.054 mu H/mm(2) up to 100 KHz, respectively, which are the orders of magnitude performance improvement in comparison with the contemporary inkjet-printed capacitors and inductors. Owing to the significant reduction of energy demand in processing tools and waste generation in processing materials, the results have revealed that the CPLoP process can facilitate the advancement of printing manufacture technology for microelectronics applications.