Time-Efficient Curing of Printed Dielectrics via Infra-Red Suitable to S2S and R2R Manufacturing Platforms for Electronic Devices

Inkjet technology is commonly used as a nonimpact, versatile, and additive digital manufacturing/printing technology. The flexibility offered by this technology toward deposition accuracy, usage, industrial upscaling relevance, and even testing of various solution processable functional materials, e.g., conductors and insulators, makes it very attractive for printed electronic applications. The focus of this paper is improving the curing time durations for inkjet-printed polymeric dielectric layers. In this paper, enhancement with regard to curing time durations is performed and they were found to be reduced dramatically down to less than 1 min using Infrared (IR) emitters, whereas the state-of-the-art curing demands a minimum of 60 min. Here in the experiments, inkjet printing was done using conductive and dielectric inks for developing fundamental devices like a capacitor. The sintering of silver electrodes was done using a conventional oven, and curing of the polymeric dielectric was done using a conventional oven as well as IR radiation. Observations are made on the basis of the dielectric insulation between the top and bottom electrodes for the capacitors containing dielectrics cured in conventional oven and those which are cured using IR radiation under two different manufacturing platforms, i.e., sheet to sheet and roll to roll.