The HI-RESPONSE technology will enable the printing of a range of functional electronic components and will therefore directly address resolution issues for a range of end-user defined technologies of importance to a range of industrially and commercially important products currently being manufactured and developed within the EU. Of specific relevance to the consortium partners:
• Printing of sensors / encoders and aerials for automotive applications requires the printing of high conductivity Cu tracks, that can achieve 50% of the bulk conductivity, sequentially with insulating / dielectric materials;
• Printing of deep copper filled trenches for through silicon vias for Silicon cells requires the printing of very highly filled copper inks with high conductivity and high solid content (up to 60 Vol.-%) that can fill trenches of dimensions of width 5-15µm, depth up to 60µm and length up to 100µm.
• Printing of metal meshes for Touch-screen and OLED requires the printing of Cu wires to a width of 1µm to remove optical inconsistencies and achieve a transparency of >95% for Touch Screen and OLED. Due to the reduced cross-sectional area, high conductivity (50% of bulk) is required so as to achieve a sheet resistivity of <100Ω/Sq. for Touch Screen and <1Ω/Sq. for OLED lighting. Separation of the x- and y-axis conductive tracks requires cross-overs and interconnects to be created from the sequential printing of conductive and non-conductive layers.
• Printing of the active materials for OLED display applications requires high resolution of well below 10µm, which cannot be achieved by conventional inkjet printing.
• Printing of ceramic ribs for strengthening of thin silicon wafers to achieve a resolution of 30 µm requires deposition of inks with a solid fraction of up to 60 Vol.-% and viscosity of > 10.000 cP which cannot be achieved by conventional inkjet printing.
Based on the exploitation of the HI-RESPONSE, the consortium estimate that it will be able to address a market of €566m/year as shown in the table for the electronic printing markets by 2020 following post-project exploitation.
In addition, HI-RESPONSE will contribute to the wider Europe 2020 targets, through:
Increased employment of 20-64 year-olds;
Increased R&D spending;
Reduced energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions;
Increased education, especially at third level education;
