Inkjet printed circuit boards

Seiko Epson Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in leveraging its proprietary inkjet technology to develop ultra-thin 20-layer circuit board.

(from this article)

Nifty! I've read of inkjets being used for all kinds of stuff and this seems like a particularly clever use. Here's an article on printing injet antennas with conductive ink. The injet antenna piece also has a nice story about how innovation happens by accident:

Carclo was working on a way to customize cell phones by printing personal images on the plastic bodies, when it ran into a problem trying to print Motorola’s silver metallic logo.

[...]

Carclo developed a prototype printer that's about the size of a small photocopier. It can print copper antennas on polycarbonate, polyester, polyethylene and other plastic films used for RFID tags, as well as on paper and cardboard. The copper layer can be as thin as half a micron and is almost as conductive as a solid copper antenna. And unlike bulk metal antennas, the printed antenna is recyclable.

I wonder if any of the check printing magnetic inks have enough conductivity to be usable for home-grown circuit printing...

Between these two technologies and the various other printer-based technologies (such as the polyester rapid prototyping rigs that are another kind of inkjet printer), I wonder how long before whole electronic devices can be printed on demand?

No TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: http://orangecone.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/106

2 Comments

Dear Sirs:

We are manufacturing a nanocopper paste, dispersed in alpha terpineol, just fitted to do this job, at only US$100 per kilo (copper content)...Pass the word
Contact:Mr.Felipe Quingles T.
fquingles@versus.cl

Mitch Resnik's work at MIT (http://dtm.media.mit.edu/dtm/dtm04/dtm04index.html) seems to be a really successful application of rapid prototyping and on-demand hardware.

Ads

Archives

ThingM

A device studio that lives at the intersections of ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, industrial design and materials science.

The Smart Furniture Manifesto

Giant poster, suitable for framing! (300K PDF)
Full text and explanation

Recent Photos (from Flickr)

Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design

By me!
ISBN: 0123748992
Published in September 2010
Available from Amazon

Observing the User Experience: a practitioner's guide to user research

By me!
ISBN: 1558609237
Published April 2003
Available from Amazon

Recent Comments

  • Adolfo Rios Pita Giurfa: Dear Sirs: We are manufacturing a nanocopper paste, dispersed in read more
  • andrew: Mitch Resnik's work at MIT (http://dtm.media.mit.edu/dtm/dtm04/dtm04index.html) seems to be a read more

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Mike Kuniavsky published on November 1, 2004 6:42 PM.

More wires and buildings was the previous entry in this blog.

The tightening spiral of cool is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.