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PE on 3D objects
May 19, 2016 | Barry Matties, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
O’Reilly: We are not a traditional equipment manufacturer per se. We offer complete solutions, integrate our deposition systems with third party automation suppliers, and develop customer specific hardware and supporting process software.
Matties: You’re more involved around the process.
O’Reilly: That is exactly what we are. We are a process company. We develop print engines, print atomizers, print heads, etc. I see a few ways we can grow. One is in process development. Another is in software development. Thirdly, is as an equipment manufacturer. We really believe in our evaluation and such that we are not a traditional equipment supplier. We are more of a high-tech company and that is how we see ourselves. I believe our growth will be in multiple areas, the bio technology sector; traditional printed electronics, filling gaps, or in next generation three-dimensional device printing. All these areas will require lots of process development including custom software and process recipe development.
As an example, just trying to find an ink that we could print on a low-temperature (<120°C) substrate material was an extremely difficult thing to do. We worked with approximately 20 companies and evaluated over 120 different formulations. We finally found three that would meet the electrical and mechanical specifications, and pass all of the environmental tests required by smartphone manufacturers. It took us almost three years of working with material vendors to find working inks and develop the associated deposition processes around them. It's not likely these material vendors can easily take those inks and move them to work with other deposition processes, processes that can’t deposit those inks in 3D space. We believe there is real value in this process development and our customers understand this value.
Matties: If someone wants to bring a unit in, what sort of investment should they expect?
O’Reilly: For production, we are talking about anywhere from $400,000 to $1 million. For R&D, $200,000 on up depending on a customer’s specific requirements.
Matties: That gets them set up to do what they need to do?
O’Reilly: Yes, and some of that is because our expertise originally was in research and development. We built our own research and development systems. In some cases, we will build a production unit for a customer. In many cases, we partner with automation vendors, where we find a vendor that really knows either how to move a piece of glass through a factory or has five axes of coordinated motion that can scale to take multiple print heads. Sometimes it is better for us to just integrate into a third party automation platform, allowing us to concentrate on our core printing competency. We do build our own platforms, which are very reliable and used for both R&D and production applications, but from an automation scale-up perspective, it sometimes makes sense to partner.
Matties: Is there a size limitation for people in terms of the size of parts that they can print?
O’Reilly: The answer is no. Our system can be placed into any automation platform. Today, we have R&D systems that can handle substrates, and I'm going to talk in millimeters here—370 by 470 which is a gen-2 piece of glass, about that size, so 15 inches by 19 inches. Our Aerosol Jet printer has been integrated into a roll-to-roll system. Automation footprint is not really an issue.
The print head and the atomizer can be tightly or loosely coupled. It depends on what your requirements are, what materials you want to deposit, whether you are in 24/7 production or developing and testing next generation printed devices.
Matties: And how you conveyorize the piece going through.
O’Reilly: That's right. There are lots of off-the-shelf automation solutions to move parts through the factory.
Matties: We are just going to see an explosion of this technology coming in from the marketplace. There are a lot of competitors. It is young and a lot of excitement. How do you see this segment of the market shaping up?
O’Reilly: There are more and more competitors every day. I am at this conference here and I am seeing some companies I have never seen before. Roll-to-roll coating equipment, slot die equipment and so on; there are a lot of different places to play. Inkjet as well, we have always seen inkjet competitors but typically in the R&D space.
I ultimately believe what is going to happen is cooperation versus competition. There is always going to be competition when it comes to the small-dollar type of R&D one-off systems. When it comes to production, there are going to be areas where Optomec, as I described earlier, can play on its own or we will be integrated into someone else's automation platform, which may be deployed for printed circuit manufacturing where both large and small features sizes are needed.
There is a company out here which have integrated our print engine into their system. They're an inkjet printing company but they have an Aerosol Jet solution built into their system because there are material sets that they cannot deposit with inkjet and we fill that gap.
Matties: It seems to me that the traditional circuit board process is huge. There are so many steps with a lot of handling errors. It just seems to me that printing the entire circuit board is the way forward. The question is how long before it really displaces current processes?
O’Reilly: I don't know the answer to that. I can tell you with current technology, a really complex printed circuit board, even printing the substrate, can take hours. If you are Intel, Dell, or other major electronics manufacturers you can't wait for hours to print. If you are the mil-aero guys, where you need 10, 50 or 1,000 of something, perhaps that may work.
Matties: As well as getting the reliability out of it. That is probably the greatest challenge right now.
O’Reilly: Right. I think there are other approaches, where you could take, for instance, a Kapton substrate, not for real complex boards but for simpler boards, and make things smaller. By using printed electronics, you could create a 20-layer board on a single layer of Kapton. How you do that is by printing one trace over another and wherever they intersect that is a connection. If you don't want it to intersect, you put a dielectric down so it creates a bridge. I know we have got some examples here that we have done for customers, who then use conductive epoxy to attach their components.
These are small devices, but they are very weight-sensitive. Typically, mil-aero applications where they are trying to shake out as much weight as possible, the old ten pounds in a five-pound bag, but this year customers are really trying to put five pounds in a one-pound bag. How do you do it? Think about the weight of a printed circuit board. It’s pretty insignificant, but then you compare it to the weight of a piece of Kapton! We will start to see these manufacturing trends emerge into the mainstream three to five years from now. Twenty years from now? I have no idea. I am going to be on the beach. [Laughs]
Matties: We are not far from it today, actually, here in Monterey. This is really interesting. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today.
O’Reilly: Barry, thank you so much for stopping by. I really appreciate it. Thanks.
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