Direct Intense Pulsed Light Sintering of Inkjet-Printed Copper Oxide Layers within Six Milliseconds

We demonstrate intense pulsed light (IPL) sintering of inkjet-printed CuO layers on a primer-coated porous PET substrate to convert the electrically insulating CuO into conductive Cu. With this approach, conductive layers are obtained in less than 1 s after the printing process. The IPL sintering was performed for high productivity with minimum duration and repetition of IPL irradiation to evaluate the effect of pulse number and energy output on the conductivity and morphology of the sintered Cu layers. Depending on the energy output, sheet resistances were measured as 0.355, 0.131, and 0.121 Omega.square(-1) by exposure energy of 5.48 (single pulse), 7.03 (double pulse), and 7.48 J.m(-2) (triple pulse), respectively. In contrast, an excessive energy with relatively short pulse duration causes a delamination of the Cu layer. The lowest resistivity of about 55.4 n Omega.m (corresponds to about 30% conductivity of bulk Cu) was obtained by an IPL sintering process of 0.26 s after the printing, which was composed of 2 ms triple pulses with 10 Hz frequency.