The leading supplier of cutting edge technology

Pulsed Light Sintering

The printed electronics market is in a transition as developments in new materials drive applications from R&D toward production. Functionally conductive inks and coatings are being manufactured with nanoparticles for use with low-temperature, low cost substrates such as paper, PET and polyethylene films.

Silver, gold and more recently, lower-cost copper nanoparticle inks are available on the market for applications in inkjets and screen printers. Printing on flexible substrates such as printed circuit boards, at room temperature, is becoming a reality.

The challenge facing producers of evolving nanoparticle inks is how to sinter or anneal these inks at substrate temperatures typically below 160 C°. Pulsed light technology from Xenon offers the solution! The high peak pulse, delivered in milliseconds, quickly heats the inks and not the substrate. The high energy removes the solvent and leaves just the metal flakes which are sintered or annealed. The substrate is not affected by the pulsed light. One advantage of the speed by which the sintering occurs is that copper ink is cured so quickly it does not develop an oxide layer that can typically form on the surface, thus improving conductivity. The flexibility of Xenon’s RC-800 series offers the ability to customize a system to match the curing needs of a range of nanoparticle inks.

To address the needs of this growing market Xenon have developed the SINTERON 2000, a new high energy and flexible tool for research, product development and tool integration.

The SINTERON 2000 provides a high energy, pulsed light for reliable, repeatable sintering of conductive nano particles on heat sensitive materials. The system features a high intensity pulsed xenon lamp that provides a broadband spectrum, from 200 nm to 1000 nm with adjustable pulse energy up to 1500 Joules/pulse. The SINTERON 2000 offers the flexibility to adjust both the energy delivered to the flashlamp and the pulse width. The pulse width can be adjusted to 4 different preset values. The energy to the flashlamp can be controlled by setting the voltage on the system.

This exceptional flexibility makes evaluating and deploying easy. For more than 45 years, Xenon has provided high-energy pulsed-light lamps and systems for the production of medical devices, optical storage media, and displays. The SINTERON 2000 can generate pulsed light for photonic sintering of nanoparticle inks on low-temperature substrates and low-temperature curing of thin- film substrates (e.g. organic photovoltaic, OLED displays and multi-layer flexible circuits). Xenon has developed products with extraordinary ranges of power and system flexibility.

Features:
  • Adjustable pulse width: 500 – 2000 us
  • Adjustable pulse energy: 180 – 1500 Joules
  • Flashlamp wavelength selections
  • Sintering area: 1.9 x 30.5 cm
Applications
  • Sintering conductive nano and flake inks
  • Curing thin-film substrates
  • Solar
  • Surface Modification

The following Xenon Corporation presentation was given by Lou Panico, CEO and was titled: Photonic Curing – Pulsed Light as a Low Temperature Sintering Process. The presentation was given at the Center for the Advancement of Printed Electronics (CAPE) program “Mastering Printed Electronics Principles”. The Center for the Advancement of Printed Electronics, located in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Western Michigan University (USA).

Click here to download presentation

In this presentation Xenon cover the background of sintering metallic nano materials such as silver (Ag) and Copper (Cu). They also discuss how pulsed light matches the needs for future roll-to-roll ink drying in high speed printing processes such as gravure and flexography.