Impulse Printing- unveiled and presented recently at TechBlick- seems to be an exciting technology. The technology details are not yet fully disclosed, and the development is still at a laboratory stage, but the disclosed results and claimed performance levels are incredible.
As you can see below, the technology can digitally print tracks with resolutions as low as 2um and as high as one millimeter. It can print materials with an extremely wide viscousity range, from 0.1 to 10,000 Pa.S, meaning that it can print copper and silver inks as well as solder and epoxy(!) based conductive adhesives! The technique prints over 3D surfaces, able to print over gaps as short as 1um and as tall as 10mm. This digital printing technique can print sequential as well as simultaneous patterns at high speeds.
The diversity in all paramters (resolution, print gap, viscosity of ink or pastes, etc) is very unique for any digital pritning process. Indeed, as shown in the chart belows, each technology occupies a given position in terms of resolution/feature size, viscosity, print gap, etc). Perhaps, as this technology inches towards scale-up, trade-offs will become clear, and not all the reported performance benefits will be satisfied at the same time.
The technology is still young and in development. Today, the print area is a small (1x10mm2) but there is a roadmap to scale the tool to be able to print first at 20x20mm2 and then 96x96mm2.
Watch this space as the technology will soon be spun out into a start up!
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