Inkjet printing of passive microwave circuitry

Inkjet printing technology was utilized to fabricate transmission lines on a glass substrate. 50 micron resolution was realized using 10 pL drop volumes on a Corning 7740 glass substrate. This can be further improved by applying other methods as described in this paper. The conductivity of the sintered silver structures were 1/6 that of bulk silver after sintering at a temperature much lower than the melting point of bulk silver. A comparison of the DC resistance of the sintered silver shows that it can be a match for electroplated and etched copper. Printed coplanar lines demonstrated losses of 1.62 dB/cm at 10 GHz and 2.65 dB/cm at 20 GHz.