Photo-sintering of Silaver Nanoparticles using UV-LED

In recent printed electronics technology, Photo-Sintering, a technique for sintering materials using a light source, has attracted attention as an alternative to time-consuming high-temperature thermal processes. The key principle of this technique is the selective heating of a strongly absorbent thin film, while preventing the heating of the transparent substrate by the light source. Many recent studies have used a flash lamp as the light source, and investigated the material-dependent effect of the width or intensity of the pulsed light. However, the flash lamp for sintering is not suitable for industry yet, because of needing too high power to sinter for a large scale. In energy-saving and large-scale sintering, LED technologies would be very useful in the near future. In this work, we investigated a sintering process for silver nanoparticles using UV-LED array. Silver nanoparticles in ink were inkjet-printed on a $1{\times}1cm$ area of a PET film and photo-sintered by 365 nm UV-LED module. A sheet resistance value as low as $72.6m{\Omega}/sq$ (2.3 - 4.5 times that of bulk silver) was obtained from the UV-LED sintering at 300 mW/cm2 for 50 min.