Development of MEMS based Piezoelectric Inkjet Print Head and Its Applications

Recently inkjet printing technology has been developed in the areas of low cost fabrication in environmentally friendly manufacturing processes. Although inkjet printing requires the interdisciplinary researches including development of materials, manufacturing processes and printing equipment and peripherals, manufacturing a printhead is still core of inkjet technology. In this study, a piezoelectric driven DOD (drop on demand) inkjet printhead has been fabricated on three layers of the silicon wafer in MEMS Technology because of its chemical resistance to industrial inks, strong mechanical properties and dimensional accuracy to meet the drop volume uniformity in printed electronics and display industries. The flow passage, filter and nozzles are precisely etched on the layers of the silicon wafers and assembled through silicon fusion bonding without additional adhesives. The piezoelectric is screen-printed on the top the pressure chamber and the nozzle plate surface is treated with non-wetting coating for jetting fluids. Printheads with nozzle number of 16 to 256 have been developed to get the drop volume range from 5 pL to 80 pL in various industrial applications. Currently our printheads are successfully utilized to fabricating color-filters and PI alignment layers in LCD Flat Panel Display and legend marking for PCB in Samsung Electronics.