Screen Printing for Electronics Industry (I)

Traditional screen printing is mainly to print some visible products, such as T-shirts, retail stall billboards and so on. However, there are many “invisible” applications for screen printing. These applications are unique in screen printing. In the industrial market, people are used to seeing "printing" as "coating," that is, applying a special medium to a product to:

Produce a seal or link;

Improve or protect the surface of the object;

Conductive.

Screen printing process is widely used in the electronics industry, especially printed circuit board manufacturers for printing:

Conductive circuit

Resist

Plating and solder resists;

Insulating medium

adhesive.

Screen printing has played an extremely important role in the development of the electronics industry, especially in printed circuit boards. With the advent of resistors, manufacturers have to reduce manual operations in the production of circuit boards and then go to screen printing. The anti-acid layer was coated on a copper plate, and then lines and grooves appeared on the circuit board through etching, and finally the solder resist material was manually filled.

Another development is the process welding process. Each circuit element and wire is manually placed on the circuit board, and the wire terminal is passed through the previously drilled limit hole, and then sent to the flow soldering machine by rail. Here, each lead terminal will be coated with solder. Industry has also developed a surface coating process, which involves screen printing solder paste mixed into the area of ​​the circuit board, the robot chip will be inserted in these areas. Solder paste can form circuit connections after melting.

The growing demand for miniaturization of various electronic boards has limited the application of screen printing. Some component line widths have been detected by microwaves and are smaller than the visible portion of the electromagnetic waves. However, screen printing has been successfully applied in its limited scope, and there are still other applications in the electronics industry.

One of the most successful applications is the manufacture of plasma displays. The display screen consists of several flat glass sheets. The outer two sheets of glass are printed on the inner surface with a series of conductive circuits, insulation circuits, and insulators. The inner glass is black in color and has thousands of small holes that are chemically etched. These holes are coated with a phosphorescent material.

The three glass plates are filled with argon vapor and combined to form a body of a flat TV screen under vacuum conditions. This technology was invented in the early 1970s and is now widely used in large-size flat TVs.

In the electronics industry, there are some obvious applications for screen printing, such as the use of ordinary screen printing ink to print TV/VCR control panel, instrument operation panel, product identification and so on. In the automotive industry, fluorescent inks are used to print luminous displays; in the airline industry, electrically conductive inks are used to print the conductive strips in the aircraft's instrument panel. Current can flow to illuminate the dashboard.

The application of these screen printing processes on one hand reflects the wide vision of the technicians, and on the other hand, it also explains the knowledge that industrial screen printing equipment suppliers should have. In the electronics industry alone, there are many process technologies that can be solved using screen printing. Like other industrial applications, the screen printing process requires a good combination of screen and machine equipment to apply multiple printed media to different substrates.