We have made a system for direct ink-jet printing of electric materials with active alignment control. The system consists of nozzles, image sensors and a target tracking system. Each nozzle is integrated with a microlens for an image sensor and a pair of electrodes to control ink-jets according to the output of the image processing. The performance of the target detecting system was accurate enough to obtain 5-µm-precision. The fabricated nozzles achieved patterning of silver nanoparticles, which can be used as conductive wires after sintering, and the patterning position was successfully controlled by the microelectrodes. The voltage-displacement relationship with R² = 0.99 was measured.

References :
Takaharu Nagai, Kazunori Hoshino, Kiyoshi Matsumoto, Isao Shimoyama, “Direct Ink-Jet Printing of Electric Materials with Active Allignment Control,” The 13th International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems (Transducers '05), pp. 1461-1464, Seoul, Korea, Jun. 5-9, 2005. [Proceedings]