TechBlick's The Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA - Why You Should Join Us?
The Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA is less than three months away. It features a world-class agenda with over 70 presentations covering exciting material breakthroughs, process innovations, manufacturing advances, application developments, and product launches. See the program here.
In this article series, we highlight various talks in the program, outlining the technologies and applications that will be showcased. In this particular article, we focus on process innovation, highlighting a diverse set of technologies, including multi-head molten metal jetting, R2R LIFT printing, microscale laser sintering for 3D metal interconnect, DLP for complex interposes, direct write spatial atomic layer deposition, and stable aerosol jetting.
In subsequent articles, we will focus on wearable and printed electronics, 3D electronics, sustainable electronics, material breakthroughs, manufacturing advances, novel applications, process innovations, and more.
It is time to join the global Additive, Printed and 3D Electronics movement: The Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA
🗓️ 11 & 12 June 2025 📍 Boston, USA 🎤 70+ World-Class Speakers 🏢 75+ Global Exhibitors 👥 550+ Participants from Around the World The early bird rates expire on 25 April 2025. In addition to the early bird rates, a special one-time promotion offers an additional 200 USD discount. Do NOT forget to book Coupon: OneOffBoston
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Multi-head molten metal jetting: reaching bulk conductivity with Cu and Ag for high current applications
A long-standing limitation of printed and additive electronics is that printed conductive pastes — whether silver or copper — do not reach bulk-level conductivity even after curing/sintering. This, and the often limited thicknesses of the printed line, often limit use cases of printed additive electronics to low-current applications, excluding nearly all power electronics applications.
At the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA, Denis Cormier from the Rochester Institute of Technology will showcase a novel process of on-demand jetting motel metals — both silver and copper — onto a moving substrate. This process enables printing metal tracks with bulk-like conductivity levels, opening the possibility of printing conductive tracks capable of carrying high currents for power electronics applications and, thereby, mimicking heavy gauge copper wire. Denis will also demonstrate how this process can transition towards multi-head printing, turning it into a high-throughput manufacturing process.
Digital multi-material printing of high-viscosity materials
Inkjet has long been the technology choice for digital printing in additive electronics. However, it is limited to low-viscosity inks, excluding most polymer thick films, solders, adhesives, etc. This has left a significant technological gap for a process that can digitally print materials across a broad range of viscosity levels, leaving most of the mass production and all of the contract manufacturing work in printed electronics to analogue screen printing.
At the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA, ioTech will join us in Boston to showcase a multi-material LIFT (Laser Induced Forward Transfer) printer able to use laser spots hitting a paste-coated film to digitally print materials across a very wide wide-viscosity spectrum ( from 500 centipos to 30000 centipos), covering screen printing pastes, solder paste, solder mask, ceramic paste, carbon paste, polyimides, conductive adhesives, epoxies, etc.
This process can be operated at high throughputs (5 million drops per hour), achieving resolutions (40-100 um) on par with state-of-the-art screen printing. Furthermore, control over the laser profile can enable not just control over the linewidth but also topographical profile of the printed material even in a single print run.
This exciting technology could finally enable digital mass production in printed electronics. Join us at the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA to hear the latest status of this technology, as well as its future roadmap and current limitations.
Upscaling to R2R LIFT making mass production with digital printed electronics viable
Digital R2R production with inkjet always faced several major limitations, namely the inability to handle a large viscosity range, process instability over long print runs due to clogging, and difficulty in switching over materials without a complete process re-optimisation and even new print heads. These were significant barriers hindering mass production with inkjet, let alone any type of contract manufacturing work - hence, partially why all contract manufacturers use screen printing worldwide.
Digital R2R production with LIFT might, however, address these issues. Indeed, Coatema Coating Machinery is such a roll-to-roll (R2R) production system combining a LIFT process with an efficient digital laser drying process, enabling efficient, high-throughput, and digital R2R manufacturing of electronics without the typical constraints of inkjet. This could be the beginning of a major new mass production process in printed electronics, finally making digital additive electronics commercially viable.
Join us at the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA to see how Coatema and partners are leveraging their years of machine-building expertise to develop the R2R LIFT printers with laser drying, how they are addressing critical technological issues, including recycling the unprinted inks and pastes, and how they are offering these systems and pilot lines for developments.
It is time to join the global Additive, Printed and 3D Electronics movement: The Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA
🗓️ 11 & 12 June 2025 📍 Boston, USA 🎤 70+ World-Class Speakers 🏢 75+ Global Exhibitors 👥 550+ Participants from Around the World The early bird rates expire on 25 April 2025. In addition to the early bird rates, a special one-time promotion offers an additional 200 USD discount. Do NOT forget to book Coupon: OneOffBoston
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Direct, ink-free, conformal printing of materials with composition/gradient control at nano-scale?
Direct, ink-free, conformal, and high-quality printing of a broad range of materials and material compositions and gradients at the micro- to nano-scale outside a clean room environment, seeking to replace even photolithography. ATLANT 3D will join the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA in Boston to explain how their innovative Direct Atomic Layer Deposition technology (DALD) enables exactly this!
General spatial atomic layer deposition (s-ALD) is an incredibly powerful process, enabling the layer-by-layer conformal growth of ultra-high-quality layers with graded material compositions. However, it lacks the ability to achieve site-specific deposition at the micro- or nano-scale, instead almost always blanket coating the entire surface.
Atlant 3D has addressed this issue, combining s-ALD with advanced mechatronics, using a microscale ALD reactor and a precision-moving stage (capable of X, Y, and Z-axis motion) to enable the site selective deposition of materials, achieving nanoscale patterning and direct printing with spatial ALD at the nano- and micro-scale.
This is a significant advancement. Unlike multi-step and multi-machine traditional photolith processes in clean rooms, it is direct nanoscale printing in ambient conditions. Unlike traditional printing in additive electronics, the material choice is not limited by ink availability, and the printed linewidth resolution and heights are not limited by the printing process.
In DALD, lateral feature size is determined by the microreactor, the vertical feature size is controlled by the ALD process itself, and the atomic composition of the printed layers by the broad range of available precursor materials in the DALD print head. This offers incredible micro- and nano-scale printing capabilities with unmatched choice of materials, composition control, feature sizes, design-to-prototype turn-around times, etc.
Microscale selective laser sintering for ultrafine and ultra-dense 3D metal interconnects - going where electroplating can not go?
How to additively manufacture 3D metal interconnects? The need to produce finer pitch bumps with denser packing is growing, leading to more stringent requirements (e.g., 10, 50 and 30um bump pitch, height and diameter, respectively) at high throughput (1-2mm3/hr)). This could move the requirements beyond the capabilities of current electroplating, necessitating the development of a new process.
Currently, not many additive processes can meet the requirements. Most printed electronics processes print only thin layers (2D or 2.5D bumps are possible), making it hard to meet the bump height requirements. Furthermore, most offer insufficient throughputs and have limited workspaces. This has thus left the space open for a novel technical solution.
At the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA, Michael Cullinan from the University of Texas at Austin reports on the novel microscale selective laser sintering (μ-SLS) process. Here, a thin layer of nanoparticle ink is first spread onto the substrate, a laser is then used to sinter the nanoparticles together in a desired pattern with micrometer resolution, before adding the next layers to build up 3D metal structure and washing away unsintered parts.
This process can achieve micrometre resolution with high throughput (~63 mm3/h) over large areas (~ 50 mm x 50 mm) and thus break the conventional tradeoff between resolution and throughput in microscale metal 3D printing. This additive process offers a way to mass produce 3D metal interconnects meeting emerging stringent industry requirements.
Curved and angled vias in ceramic interposes, enabling routing possibilities beyond traditional subtractive methods.
Tobias Schaedler from HRL Laboratories LLC — the research lab of General Motors Corporation and Boeing focused on automotive, aerospace, and defence — discusses a novel additive approach to creating ceramic interposes with unprecedented routing possibilities, including curved and angled vias. This approach offers new packaging options for the 3D integration of microelectronic subsystems.
Current methods to develop and manufacture interposers are based on photolith patterning and etching technology, leaving often to vertically straight vias. This imposes limits on the via routing options within the interposer, a layer that is growing in complexity to meet ever more challenging single routing requirements.
At the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA, HRL Laboratories LLC will showcase how digital light processing (DLP) can be applied to UV curable ceramic resins followed by metal infiltration to enable ceramic interposers with complex vias, including curved and angled vias, with diameters and pitches as small as 9 µm and 18 µm, respectively, and high conductivity.
To demonstrate process viability, this talk will also showcase (1) a curved interposer connecting a curved infrared detector with a planar ROIC and (2) a fan-out interposer that spreads the pitch of an array of vias from 60 µm to 220 µm.
These interposers require thousands of curved and angled vias, respectively, that cannot be realized using conventional microelectronics processing approaches. This is yet another example of additive and 3D electronics enabling circuit shapes beyond what traditional methods allow, opening many new design possibilities.
Making aerosol jet printing a manufacturing process: towards stable and long print runs
Aerosol jet printing is an incredible process for conformal, 3D, fine-feature additive electronics manufacturing. Indeed, an incredible array of devices and applications have thus far been developed and demonstrated. However, two long-standing barriers have acted against full mass manufacturing readiness of this technology: (1) difficult to maintain a reliable deposition over long print runs, and (2) complex motion planning
At the Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA, Ethon Secor from Iowa State University reports an AJP closed-loop control system has been developed that automatically adjusts process parameters to maintain stable printouts with print runs over 8 hours demonstrated on commercial equipment. This improves the manufacturing readiness of AJP as a general technology, streamlining process development and quality monitoring for both planar and conformal printing.
Complex toolpath planning presents a second challenge to conformal deposition, undermining this digital printing method's rapid prototyping capability. This presentation will discuss a recently developed computational framework to efficiently wrap complex planar toolpaths onto curved 3D geometries, expediting the design-to-manufacture workflow for conformal electronics for aerosol jet or other direct write deposition modalities.
These incredible advances make aerosol jets more manufacturing-ready for conformal and 3D electronics.
It is time to join the global Additive, Printed and 3D Electronics movement: The Future of Electronics RESHAPED USA
🗓️ 11 & 12 June 2025 📍 Boston, USA 🎤 70+ World-Class Speakers 🏢 75+ Global Exhibitors 👥 550+ Participants from Around the World The early bird rates expire on 25 April 2025. In addition to the early bird rates, a special one-time promotion offers an additional 200 USD discount. Do NOT forget to book Coupon: OneOffBoston
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