Commercial applications of digital printing technologies on PCBs

The PCB industry is quickly gearing up for the digital printing age. While photo imaging and screen‐printing have been commonly used as recognized and established techniques in the PCB industry, their high tooling costs and time‐consuming procedures are willingly exchanged by digital printing, following the establishment of this technology both in everyday office uses and in a variety of industrial applications. In the PCB industry, a number of companies have recently begun to offer various digital printing system configurations. This paper discusses the basic requirements of PCB ink‐jet printing systems. Possible solutions and basic system engineering considerations are presented, to show the optimal system configuration.