Bruce H. King

Micropen Printing of Electronic Components

This chapter explains a direct-write approach for fabricating highly integrated, multilayer components using a Micropen to deposit slurries in precise patterns. Micropen deposition enables printing of multilayer material structures on nonplanar substrates, enabling high-density circuitry with integrated passive components. Furthermore, this chapter presents the technologies instrumental to material integration by the Micropen, including equipment operation, slurry preparation, deposition constraints, and cofiring of multimaterial integrated passives. The four example device elements include: high precision resistors, high-capacitance density dielectrics, integrated inductor coils, and chemical sensors. The direct-write approach provides the ability to fabricate multifunctional, multimaterial integrated ceramic components (MMICCs) in an agile way with rapid turnaround. This technique is used to fabricate devices such as integrated RC filters, multilayer voltage transformers, and other passive components. Thus with advent of new levels of pen tip sophistication, vision control systems, agile materials delivery, and ultralow temperature materials, pen-dispense direct write appears to be most promising route towards high-speed, multimaterial electronics fabrication.