Chapter 7: Ink and Microelectronic Printing

Ink printing is an increasingly popular additive manufacturing method in various high-technology areas such as polymer manufacturing and metal manufacturing, which has been widely applied in key sectors like microelectronics and semiconductors. As a significant part of microelectronic printing applications, ink printing is applied with the drop-on-demand technique that generates stable and sequential nanoparticle-added droplets on the target (printing) surface. The printing quality and performance depend on the ambient conditions, the rheological and hydrodynamic properties of the droplet, and substrate specifications. Within this scope, this chapter reviews the ink and microelectronic printing process with respect to the theoretical modeling, process design criteria, general performance trends, and specific applications. The theoretical modeling consists of the droplet generation, droplet dimensions at flight, droplet characteristics on the substrate, and sequential droplet applications. After dropping on the substrate, the drying process of the droplet is analyzed via the evaporation and Marangoni flow in order to make the nano-sized solid particles well-aligned on the printing surface. Then, the impact of those parameters on applications is summarized with experimental and numerical studies. As specific and promising methods, the ink and microelectronic printing on porous surfaces or in metal additive manufacturing studies is discussed.