Dry Printing of Ag-Ni Conductive Particles Using Toner-Type Printed Electronics

Printed electronics are a set of additive manufacturing methods for creating future flexible electronics on thin polymeric sheets. We proposed the toner-type, dry, page-printing of Ag-Ni composite conductive particles on flexible plastic sheets without pre-treatment. No chemical solvents are necessary to compose the inks of the electronic materials used for the toner-type printing, and no chemical treatment is required for the plastic film substrate surface. In addition, multilayer printing is simple when using toner printing because previously printed materials do not need to be resolved; furthermore, composing the thick films of the electronic materials is relatively simple. In this study, we fabricated an Ag-Ni composite toner to improve the fluidity of the toner particles compared to bare Ag particles. We successfully printed IC peripheral circuits at a resolution of 0.20 mm and demonstrated that the actual electrical circuit pattern can be formed using our method.