Inkjet Printing for Printed Electronics

Inkjet printing (IJP) is a highly versatile and useful tool for product development, prototyping, and even small-scale manufacturing in the printed electronics industry. This chapter discusses a number of printed electronic (PE) applications. PE applications make use of inkjet-printed electrically conductive structures. At first sight, IJP might not seem the most obvious method for the manufacturing of these structures and as a result, it is rather new for PE manufacturing. The potential of IJP for PE applications has been demonstrated recently in a variety of academic and industrial research laboratories. These examples are, however, usually achieved on a sheet-to-sheet (S2 S) basis and only on a small scale. Various types of functional electronic materials can be processed into functional structures and devices by IJP. Examples include conductive metallic inks, organic semiconductors, insulators, and many others.