Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Up Close: ICT's Hayling Island, UK Seminar

Reviewing recent developments in his own group of companies, strategic acquisitions, shrewd investment, and positive, often lateral, thinking had built one of the UK’s most innovative PCB manufacturers with a unique suite of services. Always conscious of the need to encourage young people into the industry by engaging them as early as possible in STEM skills, the latest initiative was an educational programme aimed at teaching PCB technology in schools to 7- to 10-year-olds, under the name Ragworm Education. Specially developed and researched workbooks were focused on the fundamental science behind the PCB, with cartoon-style illustrations and friendly characters based on ground-breaking scientists of the modern era.

Driver’s summing-up message was to be proud of heritage and brand, to innovate and educate, to be different and be first, to think global and partner for the greater good, to listen to the customer, and to create new standards.

The second presentation came from Mark Loader of Viking, a UK equipment distributor and manufacturer of ink-jet printers, with an overview of the history and development of ink-jet printing and its applications. The concept of ink-jet printing was established in 1867, when a patent was registered by Lord Kelvin for a recorder for telegraph signals. Commercial devices were introduced in the early 1950s, as medical strip-chart recorders, but it was not until the late 1970s that printers were developed that could reproduce digital images generated by computers.

Loader explained the principles of continuous and drop-on-demand technologies. The continuous technique was the most widely used in industry, particularly for batch-coding, bar-coding and date-coding of products and packages, whereas the drop-on-demand technique, as used in document printing, presented opportunities in electronics manufacturing. He listed a range of jettable materials and gave examples of applications developed for PCB and printed electronics fabrication. In PCB manufacture, ink-jet offered a digital alternative to screen print for etch resist and legend printing. In printed electronics, ink-jet offered a precise means of depositing polymer thick film conductor, semiconductor and dielectric materials, with the possibility to perform multiple operations on the same machine. Optoelectronics and displays was a rapidly growing market sector where ink-jetted thin-film silver nanoparticle inks were increasingly used, and significant progress was being made in roll-to-roll processing of flexible substrates.

“Innovative Thermal Management – Made in UK” was the title of the presentation by Ralph Weir, CEO of Nanotherm, who claim to produce the world’s highest performance thermal management substrates for electronics. Their nano-ceramic dielectric coatings, applied on to the surface of aluminium by an undisclosed electrolytic process, were four to 10 times thinner than conventional resin-based materials, and conducted heat two to three times better. This enabled extremely efficient heat dissipation and allowed LED manufacturers to reduce costs, improve the lifetime of their LED products by up to four times, and to generate greater luminosity within the same physical footprint.

Weir shared, "Most engineers do not understand thermal management: ''I want a 2 Watt material!’ and that naivety pushed their costs up, and their jobs out of Europe." He offered examples as well: UK lighthouses use Nanotherm with 2.5X increase in light and a 16X increase in reliability; UV-cured digital inks use Nanotherm and see double throughput from printer; consumer light bulbs use Nanotherm and are half the cost to manufacture; and Thermo electric generators get 36% more power output. The smartphone market was a current target for development, and thermoelectric generators presented a substantial future opportunity.

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