The present level of development of the microelectronics industry is to solve process problems, and the greatest immediate need is for process machinery to support development.
By John Fraser
The microelectronics industry is developing the ability to print active electronic circuits on inexpensive and non-traditional substrates in extremely large volumes. Some of the potential products are intelligent RFID tags, intelligent packaging, large-area devices such as solar-cell arrays and LED panels, smart sensors for food and medical uses, and energy storage. The substrates will be low cost with low temperature characteristics and will eventually be processed on wide-web printing equipment. The electronic components will also be large-area and low-temperature devices. The volume of the end products being manufactured will be measured in square kilometers rather than square centimeters. And the intelligence of the new products will enable the next era of revolutionary social changes.
I see the microelectronics industry as presently developing the basic processes and materials for printed electronics. The industry does not yet have good materials for semiconductor performance, although conductors and insulators are well enough defined so that process development for small conductors and small conductor spacings can be investigated in detail. Inasmuch as the printed-semiconductor chemistry is poorly defined, so also is the associated substrate incompletely defined. The microelectronics industry has a lot of work to do on material definition. Polymers, glasses, and metals are all candidates as materials for both the substrate and the printing cylinder, and all must be compatible with the chemistries that emerge for the semiconductor materials. A critical characteristic of the new semiconductor-material processes is that they must be processed at low temperature and at ambient gas pressures. These are the enabling characteristics of high-volume, low-material-cost products.
Gravure printing is ideal for the materials being printed as electronic devices and compatible with a large variety of substrate materials. The gravure process holds the ink in cups or depressions below the surface of the image-carrying cylinder and because of the rather large volume of the ink-carrying cup, solid materials can be carried in the inks as well. The mechanical properties of the ink, such as viscosity, density, and chemistry can vary widely. The material of the cylinder can be almost any metallic material or synthetic and can be tailored for compatibility with the process and chemistry of the ink, the substrate, and the processing steps of the product. Gravure has already been proven at line widths and spacings down to individual microns with the microelectronic-process materials presently being investigated.
Process machinery is in development in the 100- to 1-μm accuracy range to respond to the new needs of the microelectronics industry. Mechanical techniques developed for the submicron-semiconductor industry certainly are appropriate for the microelectronics industry, and they are a part of the design for high accuracy. Conventional printing, however, does not profit from lines and accuracies below about 100 μm. The eye does not see misregistration or detail variations at that level, and there is no profitability in designing conventional printing machinery to handle that level of accuracy. In the microelectronics world of products of large-volume output, the accuracies that fall between the semiconductor and conventional printing are the technological enablers. So the production environment of microelectronics will be one of a synthesis of the best practices of the semiconductor and printing industries.
An example of a predicted product is an RFID tag as a near-term goal of microelectronics. By including logic and memory capability on the tag, enough information can be included to individually tag each item on a store’s shelf. Lighting by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) has the promise of the highest efficiency and lowest maintenance of present technologies. With the cost of energy soaring, it is likely that staggering amounts of LED illumination devices, perhaps in the form of ceiling tiles, will be needed. This requires a process capable of producing thousands of square kilometers of product.
The present level of development of the microelectronics industry is to solve process problems, and the greatest immediate need is for process machinery to support development. As the processes stabilize, larger and faster production equipment will become necessary. Ohio Gravure Technologies looks forward to an exciting future in this large and growing new industry.
John Fraser is a physicist with Ohio Gravure Technologies. He works in product R&D and manufacturing processes. He has been with Ohio Gravure Technologies and its predecessors for 28 years. Fraser holds or has participated in multiple patents with respect to gravure technology and unrelated fields. He works with mechanical, electrical and electronic, optical, magnetic, servomechanisms, and general physical applications. He has been a physicist for more than 40 years.
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