Laser Processing of Parmod™ Functional Electronic Materials

Parmod™ is a family of materials that can be printed and thermally cured to create metallic conductors on printed wiring boards. This additive process provides a way to produce circuitry direct from CAD files without the necessity for intermediate tooling of any kind. The printed images are converted to pure metallic traces in seconds at a temperature low enough to be compatible with commonly used rigid and flexible polymer-based substrates. This simple, two-step process eliminates the hazardous wastes and employee health and safety issues associated with conventional plate-and-etch photolithographic technology Recently the Parmod™ technology has been extended from metals to oxides to enable printing passive electronic components such as resistors, capacitors and inductors, as well as the metallic interconnects. While thermal curing of the oxides provides useable electronic properties, particularly of resistors and capacitors, the performance of all these novel materials could be improved by laser processing. This paper discusses preliminary results on laser processing of Parmod™ conductors and components in two different systems