Applications of Three Dimensional Laser Induced Metallization Technology with Polymer Coating

A fully developed technology of three dimensional laser induced metallization (LIM) on molded interconnect devices (MIDs) is widely used on various products. The target substrate is sprayed with a special thin layer (50 $\mu m$) polymer coating first, and heated at 80 °C to cure. Then using laser to define the pattern of conductors and induce the catalyst in the special polymer layer. After the electroless copper plating, the pattern is metallized. The whole process can be fully copy again on layer-by-layer to achieve the idea of multi-layer. For the high feasibility on any complex surface and material, such as glass, plastic, ceramic, etc., the LIMtechnology can be used for vary kind of products. In this paper, the LIM technology has applied on QR code stickers, 2G/3G/4G all-in-one compact antenna, mm-wave antenna, built-in antenna on mobile phone case, multi-layer NFC antenna, and humanoid robot finger. The QR code can be patterning on a thin film of 100 um and with a great flexibility. In addition, the return loss of 2G/3G/4G all-in-one compact antenna reaches the 3:1 VSWR standard, and the radiation efficiency is larger than 60% within the operation frequency. The built-in antenna on mobile phone case can reduce the waste of space and strongly secure the antenna from detachment. The LIM technology applied on the ceramic substrate can successfully fabricate a high directionality 38GHz mm-wave antenna and with above 10dBi of array gain, average efficiency up to 50%, and bandwidth up to 2 GHz. Furthermore, the multi-layer NFC antenna can successfully reduce the size and reach the maximum read distance of 3 cm. Using the same idea of multi-layer, the capacitive tactile sensor that can sense both normal and shear force is placed on humanoid robot finger to provide the tactile ability. The products described above will be briefly introduced in this paper and related testing results will be mentioned.