Dry aerosol jet printing of conductive silver lines on a heated silicon substrate

Abstract

A new method for dry aerosol jet printing conductive lines on a heated substrate is presented. The method is based on the use of a spark discharge generator as a source of dry nanoparticles and a heating plate for their sintering. This method allows creating conductive silver lines on a heated silicon substrate up to 300 °C without an additional sintering step. It was found that for effective sintering lines of silver nanoparticles the temperature of the heated substrate should be about more than 200-250 °C. Average thickness of the sintered silver lines was equal to ~20 µm. Printed lines showed electrical resistivity equal to 35 μΩcm, which is 23 times greater than the resistivity of bulk silver.