Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1443477
62 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2022 Beaulieu: Now let's get specific about the com- pany. What do you do exactly? Birnbaum: Over the past five years, ioTech has been busy perfecting its CLAD deposition technology. CLAD stands for continuous laser assisted deposition. e first deliverable is the IO-300 laser-assisted deposition printer. e system is incredibly versatile. It can be used for any application where multiple materials need to be deposited on any type of substrate, including non-planar surfaces. Our first application is depositing solder paste. We can achieve resolutions as low as 100 µm, offer the flexibility of digital printing, and do so at industrial level, high speed, jetting thousands of droplets every second. Our second application is the deposition of adhesives and coating materials, such as for gaskets, camera modules, packaging, MEMS devices, and other components. We are also developing a digital and green electronic circuit manufacturing process that offers a fabless solution to PCB manufacturing. e process delivers metallization, multi-lay- ers, solder mask, pad finish and legend using industrial grade materials and resolutions down to 20 µm—all in one machine. Figure 1 shows a single layer PCB of 35 mm x 50 mm printed on an FR-4 substrate. e pat- terning is at 100 µm resolution, but higher reso- lutions are possible too, down to 50 mm lines. We can go down to 20 mm at the expense of speed. In this case, the copper paste is from Israeli startup Copprint, and the solder resist is from Taiyo Ink, but we can accommodate other materials as well. No other system is capable of printing cop- per and solder mask together, reducing the number of process steps. It also reduces the environmental impact considerably. We already successfully validated the con- cept with five materials (copper, dielectric, solder mask, silver, and legend) and we have started beta testing the system in a production site. It's exciting because it's the first time a sys- tem prints conductors, dielectrics, and solder resist together. Figure 1: Single layer PCB showing both copper metallization and solder mask coating. Ralph Birnbaum