Photonic Curing Explanation and Application to Printing Copper Traces on Low Temperature Substrates Open Access

Photonic curing is a transient thin-film thermal processing technique using flashlamps. It was developed by NovaCentrix^® and incorporated in the PulseForge^® toolset to address the need of the printed electronics industry to process high temperature materials on low temperature substrates such as paper and plastic on a moving web. Applications include photovoltaics, displays, solid state lighting, thin film batteries, RFID tags, and printed circuits. The ability to substitute inexpensive and flexible substrates for expensive, rigid substrates while achieving similar performance can dramatically reduce the cost of the final product and enable new products. In this paper, we discuss the technology and mechanisms of the process and illustrate a case study of forming copper traces on plastic and paper in a roll-to-roll environment. Here, a low cost copper oxide ink is printed on plastic or paper and chemically reacted using pulsed light from the PulseForge tool to form highly conductive copper traces. This process is performed in an ambient atmosphere.