Design and manufacturing of high precision roll-to-roll multilayer printing machine -- machine upgrade

Abstract

In 2008, a group of MIT Master of Engineering students built a roll to roll machine for printing thiol onto a flexible gold substrate by self-assembly. The machine demonstrated good performance in high speed printing (400 ft/min). Since single layer printing is limited in industrial application, we reconfigured this machine for multi-layer printing . Our project includes developing a device that can fabricate high quality stamps, which is vital in print quality; increasing the roll to roll machine accuracy in critical components, which helps increases the machine's repeatability. In addition, we have designed a multilayer printing system using the same technology and demonstrated it with the upgraded machine. The flat stamp cast by the new machine can achieve the flatness of ±16 [micro]m with thickness of 1194 [micro]m, compared to ±32 [micro]m of stamp made with other machine. An initial experiment with multi-layer printing using the upgraded machine has shown that better control of the roll drive system and better registration measurement will be required to meet the necessary specification. However, the first experiment did can achieve alignment errors of 1017 [micro]m along the printing direction and 113 [micro]m across the printing direction