Low-Temperature Sintering of Nanometal Inks on Polymer Substrates

Digital non-contact-printing technologies such as inkjet or Aerosol Jet are becoming more and more interesting for the manufacturing of electronic components due to their benefits such as easy variation of printing layouts, short process chains without masks, large variety of usable substrates and inks - frequently based on nano metals - and a certain 3D capability. In this contribution options are discussed to sinter nano metal inks such as Ag, Au, and CuNi inks at low temperature, thus enabling the use of temperature sensitive polymer substrates like PC, PS, or PMMA. This includes the addition of chemical agents as well as light-based sintering methods such as photonic curing or laser sintering. Finally some application examples are presented.