Process Recipes for SMD Interconnection on Aqueous Conductive Inks using Direct-Write Printing

Additive print methods for fabricating electronics eliminate the need for plating baths. Earlier inks used volatile solvents to achieve conductive traces. This work studies the realization of additively printed circuits with water-based inks. Printing, in addition to the benefits of reduced costs and waste, provides a greater range of flexible and rigid substrate options. However, there are other hurdles to printing functioning electrical devices, such as print quality, smoothness, and registration accuracy requirements that exceed those of graphic printing. Substrate parameters include smoothness, compressibility, porosity, ink receptivity, wettability, and ink properties, including ink chemistry, viscosity, rheological behavior, solvent evaporation rate, and drying, which are therefore crucial. Extensive studies are necessary before mass manufacturing can begin, but there is also the possibility of including environmental factors in the development of the technology. It is generally believed that decisions taken during the early design phase affect more than 80 percent of a product's environmental impact. Water-based silver inks, however, have been offered as viable replacements for ecologically unfriendly organic solvents and harmful chemicals due to environmental concerns and health problems. This work studies the interconnection performance of aqueous-based inks with various interconnect materials such as ECA and LTS. For frequency-based applications, assess the influence of aqueous-based ink performance under varying frequencies. The performance of the interconnects is compared to the tolerance limits of the COTs. The intermetallic at the interface of conductive adhesive and additively printed circuits has been examined using optical and SEM examination. To simulate the applications, we used OrCAD software to build and test a digital circuit. The performance of the digital circuit has been compared and evaluated to the laser ablated copper clad substrate for the various bonding materials employed.