With the growing demand for ever-smaller devices, such as mini- and microLED displays with higher resolution rates, there is an unstoppable trend towards miniaturisation of components. High-speed, mass-production of these electronics is getting more and more difficult, because the handling and accurate placement of these tiny components is very challenging. Each component needs to be carefully selected, transferred and then accurately placed and assembled with interconnects – all at lightning speeds. As conventional industrial equipment fail to deposit ultrafine pattens of die attach material and handle such tiny components at required high rates, this calls for development of alternative high-throughput assembly technologies.

Volume-Controlled Laser Printing

TNO at Holst Centre is continually pushing the boundaries of hybrid printed electronics technologies to open new frontiers and enable new promising applications. Leveraging on over a decade-long experience in development and maturing of Laser Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) technology and bringing it to the next level, we have developed a new laser-assisted printing technology – Volume-Controlled Laser Printing (VCLP) – capable of high-throughput deposition of ultrafine interconnects, such as conductive adhesives and solder pastes, from structured carrier plated covered with a proprietary permanent release layer

At TNO at Holst Centre we believe that high-throughput deposition of ultrafine interconnect patterns using VCLP technology opens up new possibilities for various applications, particularly, flip chip integration of micro-LED displays.

Laser-Assisted Microcomponent Transfer

To complement VCLP interconnect printing technology and complete high-throughput integration of microcomponents, we have developed another laser-assisted technology targeted to selectively and accurately transfer microcomponents from carrier wafers populated with high-density arrays of microcomponents. We have already demonstrated that with our innovative and proprietary release stack we enable high-throughput, fast and well-controlled release of microcomponents, as small as 40x40x10 µm3.

Outlook

We believe that combination of aforementioned laser-based technologies is very well suited for the mass-production of large arrays of microcomponents, such as microLED displays, where high precision and throughput are key technology bottlenecks hindering commercialization and mass-production of this application domain. Moreover, this technologies have great potential for other domains as well, such as the manufacturing of optical sensor arrays.