UV-sintering of inkjet-printed conductive silver tracks

In this paper we report an alternative sintering method for conductive silver tracks by UV radiation. The silver patterns have been obtained by inkjet printing from a commercially available silver nanoparticle ink. Different polymer materials such as polyimide, polycarbonate and liquid crystal polymer have been used as substrate materials. UV-curing resulted in highly conductive patterns with resistivities as low as four times that of bulk silver. The choice of substrate material has shown to greatly influence the achievable conductivity values. Furthermore it was demonstrated that UV-sintering resulted in lower substrate temperature as compared to thermal sintering to get similar resistance values.