Fujifilm technology used for inkjet fabrication of solar cells

Konarka Technologies is claiming a manufacturing breakthrough using Fujifilm Dimatix inkjet technology for advanced materials deposition of solar cells.

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 3/28/2008

Fujifilm Corp wholly owned subsidiary and industrial inkjet printhead company Fujifilm Dimatix reported this week that its cartridge-based Dimatix materials printer (DMP) has been used in what it believes is the world’s first known demonstration of inkjet technology for manufacturing photovoltaic solar cells.

Researchers from Konarka Technologies published the results of using Fujifilm Dimatix inkjet technology as a fabrication tool for the controlled deposition of its photovoltaic material in the journal, Advanced Materials. 

The company said its demonstration confirms that organic solar cells can be processed with printing technologies with little or no loss compared to “clean room” semiconductor technologies such as spin coating and that inkjet technology is promising for fabricating photovoltaics because it is compatible with various substrates and does not require additional patterning.

The Dimatix materials printer is a turnkey, bench-top materials deposition toolset that uses Fujifilm Dimatix’ inkjet technology and Shaped Piezo Silicon MEMS fabrication processes in depositing picoliter-sized droplets of functional fluids on all types of surfaces.

The toolset uses single-use cartridges that researchers can fill with their own fluid materials in order to minimize waste of expensive fluid materials, and eliminated the cost and complexity associated with traditional product development and prototyping.

DMP is also suitable for prototyping and low-volume manufacturing, as the technology is scalable from R&D to production, the company said.

This use of inkjet technology to fabricate solar energy cells has been called a “breakthrough” by Lowell, Mass-based Konarka, which developed and commercialized “Power Plastic,” a material that converts light to energy.

“Demonstrating the use of inkjet printing technology as a fabrication tool for highly efficient solar cells and sensors with small area requirements is a major milestone,” Rick Hess, president and CEO of Konarka, said in a statement.

Printed electronics technology promises extremely low cost, flexible, and disposable circuitry that can be manufactured with custom inkjet printers or high-speed presses with designers using multilayer ink formulations to turn basic elements like thin-film transistors, resistors, inductors, and capacitors into low-density circuits that can be printed along with the product packaging.

In April 2007, Minnesota-based integrated printed electronics maker Soligie Inc and Oslo, Norway-based non-volatile polymer memory specialist Thinfilm Electronics ASA entered into an agreement to jointly develop processes for producing printed memory in commercial volumes.

Also, in 2006, several new companies announced they were working with a technology for printing circuits on plastic or thin film using commercial inkjet printers, with the aim of radically altering the economics of producing chips and the time it takes to create them.

Indeed, printed electronics are set to be one of the next big things, with the biggest potential in organic or combined organic/inorganic structures because they often promise the lowest costs, allied to the fastest printing technology, such as gravure employing water-based inks, with low temperature curing, according to UK market research company IDTechEx.