Additive printing process opens the door to plastic microchips

At the recent Munich Productronica 2005 show, the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (Munich, Germany) demonstrated additive printing technology for the production of polymer circuits, which is expected to pave the way for the production and application of plastic microchips. There are seven steps in this process, which can produce organic-based ring oscillators, transistors, and logic circuits. Compared with silicon wafers, these products have the advantages of low cost and light weight, and they also have the advantage of durability in products such as degradable electronic products, RFID, greeting cards, and paper toys.

The first step in the process is to build a copper coating, which also includes decomposition of the polymer semiconductor material, diode photoprinting, traces, and silver-coated conductive coatings. This process can already be put into practical use. It can produce all ring oscillators and other components using polymer on 20mm wide FET film. The thickness of copper metal layer is 0.5μm.


Source: Today Electronics