• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.439-444
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• 2022

Laser-induced plasmonic sintering of metal nanoparticles (NPs) is a promising technology to fabricate flexible conducting electrodes, since it provides instantaneous, simple, and scalable manufacturing strategies without requiring costly facilities and complex processes. However, the metal NPs are quite expensive because complicated synthesis procedures are needed to achieve long-term reliability with regard to chemical deterioration and NP aggregation. Herein, we report laser-induced Ag NP self-generation and sequential sintering process based on low-cost Ag organometallic material for demonstrating high-quality microelectrodes. Upon the irradiation of laser with 532 nm wavelength, pre-baked Ag organometallic film coated on a transparent polyimide substrate was transformed into a high-performance Ag conductor (resistivity of 2.2 × 10^-4 Ω·cm). To verify the practical usefulness of the technology, we successfully demonstrated a wearable transparent heater by using Ag-mesh transparent electrodes, which exhibited a high transmittance of 80% and low sheet resistance of 7 Ω/square.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.18-23
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• 2022

Electrohydrodynamic jet (e-jet) printing, a type of direct contactless microfabrication technology, is a versatile fabrication process that enables a wide range of micro/nanopattern arrays by applying a strong electric field between the nozzle and the substrate. In general, the morphology and the thickness of polymers/quantum dot micropatterns show a systematic dependence on the diameter of the nozzle and the ink composition with a fully automated printing machine. The purpose of this report is to provide typical examples of e-jet printed micropatterns of polymers/quantum dots to explain the effect of each process variable on the result of experiments. Here, we demonstrate several operating conditions that allow high-resolution printing of layers of polymers/quantum dots with a precise control over thickness and submicron lateral resolution.

• Proceedings of the Materials Research Society of Korea Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.3.2-3.2
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• 2011

In recent years, inkjet printing technology has received significant attention as a micro/nanofabrication technique for flexible printing of electronic circuits and solar cells, as well for biomaterial patterning. It eliminates the need for physical masks, causes fewer environment problems, lowers fabrication costs, and offers good layer-to-layer registration. To fulfill the requirements for use in the above applications, however, the inkjet system must meet certain criteria such as high frequency jetting, uniform droplet size, high density nozzle array, etc. Existing inkjet devices are either based on thermal bubbles or piezoelectric pumping; they have several drawbacks for flexible printing. For instance, thermal bubble jetting has limitations in terms of size and density of the nozzle array as well as the ejection frequency. Piezoelectric based devices suffer from poor pumping energy in addition to inadequate ejection frequency. Recently, an electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing technique has been suggested and proposed as an alternative to thermal bubble or piezoelectric devices. In EHD jetting, a liquid (ink) is pumped through a nozzle and a strong electric field is applied between the nozzle and an extractor plate, which induce charges at the surfaces of the liquid meniscus. This electric field creates an electric stress that stretches the meniscus in the direction of the electric field. Once the electric field force is larger than the surface tension force, a liquid droplet is formed. An EHD inkjet head can produce droplets smaller than the size of the nozzle that produce them. Furthermore, the EHD nano-inkjet can eject high viscosity liquid through the nozzle forming tiny structures. These unique features distinguish EHD printing from conventional methods for sub-micron resolution printing. In this presentation, I will introduce the recent research results regarding the EHD nano-inkjet and the printing system, which has been applied to solar cell or thin film transistor applications.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.5 s.311
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• pp.37-44
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• 2006

In this paper, a new version of the ICM method(MICM, modified ICM) in which the contextual information is modelled by Markov random fields (MRF) is introduced. To extract the feature, a new local MRF model with a fitting block neighbourhood is proposed. This model selects contextual information not only from the relative intensity levels but also from the geometrically directional position of neighbouring cliques. Feature extraction depends on each block's contribution to the local variance. They discriminates it into several regions, for example context and background. Boundaries between these regions are also distinctive. The proposed algerian performs segmentation using directional block fitting procedure which confines merging to spatially adjacent elements and generates a partition such that pixels in unified cluster have a homogeneous intensity level. From experiment with ink rubbed copy images(Takbon, 拓本), this method is determined to be quite effective for feature identification. In particular, the new algorithm preserves the details of the images well without over- and under-smoothing problem occurring in general iterated conditional modes (ICM). And also, it may be noted that this method is applicable to the handwriting recognition.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.5 s.311
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• pp.30-36
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• 2006

In this paper, a new type of written image segmentation based on relative comparison of region areas is proposed. The original image is composed of two distinctive regions; information and background. Compared with this binary original image, the observed one is the gray scale which is represented with complex regions with speckles and noise due to degradation or contamination. For applying threshold or statistical approach, there occurs the region-deformation problem in the process of binarization. At first step, the efficient iterated conditional mode (ICM) which takes the lozenge type block is used for regions formation into the binary image. Secondly the information region is estimated through selecting action and restored its primary state. Not only decision of the attachment to a region but also the calculation of the magnitude of its area are carried on at each current pixel iteratively. All region areas are sorted into a set and selected through the decision parameter which is obtained statistically. Our experiments show that these approaches are effective on ink-rubbed copy image (拓本 'Takbon') and efficient at shape restoration. Experiments on gray scale image show promising shape extraction results, comparing with the threshold-segmentation and conventional ICM method.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.15-24
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• 2014

Recently, a variety of printing technologies, including ink jet, gravure, and roll-to-roll (R2R) printing, has generated intensive interest in the application of flexible and wearable electronic devices. However, the actual use of printing technique is much limited because the sintering process of the printed nanoparticle inks remains as a huge practical drawback. In the fabrication of the conductive metal film, a post-sintering process is required to achieve high conductivity of the printed film. The conventional thermal sintering takes considerable sintering times, and requires high temperatures. For application to flexible devices, the sintering temperature should be as low as possible to minimize the damage of polymer substrate. Several alternative sintering methods were suggested, such as laser, halogen lamp, infrared, plasma, ohmic, microwave, and etc. Eventually, the new sintering technique should be applicable to large area, R2R, and polymer substrate as well as low cost. This article reviews progress in recent technologies for several sintering methods. The advantages and disadvantages of each technology will be reviewed. Several issues for the application in R2R process are discussed.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.28 no.12
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• pp.1007-1010
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• 2017

In this paper, a frequency selective surface(FSS) with bandstop operation for radio-frequency spectrum management is presented. The proposed FSS is composed of patterns of fractal-based miniaturized unit cells for stable performance for angles of incidence and polarizations. For practical applications requiring high productivity and environmental compatibility, we fabricated a film-type FSS by screen-printing using Ag ink, rather than a conventional manufacturing method using a printed circuit board. To validate this study, we measured the transmission characteristics of the proposed FSS using the free-space measurement method, and observed the received strength of signal penetrating the FSS film applied to a wall.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.477-481
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• 2014

Flexible electronics have been to the fore because it is believed that flexibility can add incredible value such as light weight and mobility into the existing electronic devices and create new markets of large-area and low-cost electronics such as wearable eletronics in near future. Offset printing processes are regarded as major candidates for manufacturing the flexible electronics because they can provide the patterning resolution of micron-size effectively in large-area. In view of mechanics, the most important viewpoint in offset printing is how to achieve the synchronized movement of two contact surfaces in order to prevent slip between two contact surfaces and distortion of the blanket surface during ink transfer so that the high-resolution and good-overlay patterns can be printed. In this paper, a novel low-cost measurement method of the synchronization error using the motor control output signals is proposed and the compensation method is presented to minimize the synchronization error.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.87-91
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• 2010

Charged micro-particles are widely used as the key components for many electrical applications such as an e-paper, a touch panel, a printer toner and an electronic ink. Among them, the e-paper is an emerging reflective type display using the charged particles that has the advantages of the extremely low power consumption and sunlight readability. To create images on the e-paper, we confine black positively-charged and white negatively-charged particles between bottom and top electrodes and selectively apply the electric field. When the Coulomb force by an applied electric field is greater than the adhesion force between the charged particle and the electrode, the particles' transition happens resulting in the change of color between black and white. Therefore, the adhesion force is a very important factor for designing and estimating e-paper's operation. In this study, we constructed a basic model for particle's transition and an adhesion force equation describing particle's transition with three different forces: electrostatic image force, Van der Waals force and gravitational force. The simulation results showed that the gravitational force is negligible for the interesting range for the charge and the radius, and the adhesion force can be strongly dependent on the particle's charge and radius.

• Journal of the Korean Vacuum Society
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.146-154
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• 2011

The adhesive-tape of a liquid leak film sensor including the alarm system is developed. The sensing film is composed of three layers such as base film layer, conductive line layer, and protection film layer. The thickness of film is 300~500 um, the width is 3.55 cm, and the unit length is 200 m. On the conductive line layer, three conducting lines and one resistive line are formulated by the electronic printing method with a conducting ink of silver-nano size. When a liquid leaks for the electricity to be conducted between the conductive line and the resistive line, the position of leakage is monitored by measuring the voltage varied according to the change of resistance between two lines. The error range of sensing position of 200 m film sensor is ${\pm}1m$.