Meyer Burger on Inkjet Technology and Digital Printing Benefits

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

Veri: They do, and we currently work with all major ink suppliers to qualify their solder mask inks with our equipment

Matties: How does that sort enter your strategy?

Veri: We have to build a machine that can support a variety of inks to be compatible with the different components and ink chemistries. We work closely with a variety of ink suppliers around the world; many of them have our research tools in their labs and use them to formulate inks. For some of the inks that become commercialized, through the nature of our relationship with these ink suppliers, we have a very good understanding of how to print those inks, and we’ve built our machinery to be compatible with those inks.

Matties: Do you have to tune your machine to the different recipes or are they tuning their recipes to your machine?

Veri: Normally, the inks are tuned to the printhead and substrate that the ink will interact with, but not necessarily with our machine. We’ll accommodate a variety of inks, but the real challenge is how that ink interfaces with the substrate and whether it degrades the substrate or enhances it through the substrate’s lifetime.

Matties: Are people purchasing multiple machines dedicated to a specific brand of ink, or is the changeover from ink to ink simple and easy?

Veri: Typically, you want to be able to change over from ink to ink.

Matties: And you accommodate that quite easily?

Veri: Yes.

Matties: Is changeover a big issue?

Veri: In some cases, it can be because the printhead systems might have to change. If you’re printing an ink from a similar family, that might require a different printhead. The changeover time is more related to ink system purging, cleaning, and refilling.

Matties: I would think that if there’s enough demand for two or three different types, they would just buy two or three different pieces and leave them dedicated. That would make the most sense.

Veri: Right.

Matties: There’s definitely a lot going on in this technology. What’s your projection for when will be commonplace? I know that’s kind of a broad term.

Veri: That is a broad question, but in terms of a timeline for adoption, I’d say probably another five years. There has already been an early adoption in the circuit board and semiconductor market where we have customers using the tools. We also have customers using it in the photovoltaic market. It's about finding other customers that have similar interests and priorities to adapt these applications. We know the inks are available, the machine is durable, the printheads are reliable, and the JETx produces 24 hours a day and seven days a week with very nice uptime. But it’s important to find and continue to promote the application and its benefits and find others who see a need that can be addressed with this type of additive technique.

Matties: What advice would you give to a circuit board fabricator that wants to bring this into their facility? What would be the first step?

Veri: First, take a look at all of the physical capability of the machine to print different structures, including the versatility of the machine to print not only inks but also barcodes and QR codes, which also eliminates secondary steps. Once you learn about the flexibility of the application, then you can start looking at the economics of the application and device performance. It’s a three-tiered approach to machine qualification.

Matties: What sort of ROI do you expect people to get on their investment here?

Veri: In general, ROIs can range from one to two years in terms of a payback scenario.

Matties: And in terms of operator training, are there any obstacles in that area?

Veri: We don’t see that as an obstacle. Operator training is really important; it’s a new way of working, and you have to allow the time in fabrication for training. It’s critical to create an in-house expert who owns the process of training and retraining staff because there’s a fairly high degree of turnover and absenteeism with operators. However, a single operator can run multiple machines, which is an advantage; you don’t need to have one operator dedicated to each printer.

Matties: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you feel we should include in this conversation?

Veri: The versatility and application space is something that should be noted from semiconductors to PCBs and flexible and consumer electronics. There are a variety of inks available in the market that are already industrialized, have UL certification and meet requirements of existing manufacturing processes. There’s really not an evolution of ink in that respect; it’s more of the evolution of the application and the motivation in the industry to find it.

There are a lot of commonalities. If you’re going to print a polyimide on a circuit board versus a polyimide on a semiconductor wafer, there’s a commonality in the print systems. Synergies can be gained from our side that we can apply to different market segments, and that’s what we see from our standpoint. We find the best potential in the market by finding applications where these inks that are established, the applications can be developed, and value can be realized out of these series of ink systems from a different ink supplier.

Matties: I’m still struggling to get my hands around the motivation. If you were to summarize for me, what’s the one big reason an OEM would adopt this?

Veri: I think the OEM is going to look for speed and flexibility. They’re looking for increased product performance and cost, and if we can check the boxes for each of those four categories, then we have a pretty compelling story.

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