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To review opportunities for use of digital printing in the printed circuit board (PCB) industry and to introduce background to ink jet printing, process development and applications in order to reduce costs, enhance efficiency and to enable PCB producers to operate in a more sustainable and flexible manner.

This paper has been written to provide a review of ink jet printing applications in the PCB industry. Ink jet print technology background, ink development and the processes made possible by ink and print head improvements have been described together with a description of the benefits available through digital printing.

It was found that there have been significant developments over recent years in both hardware technology (print heads and accurate print platforms) as well as improvements in the design of inks both for ink jet print performance and functional characteristics. These improvements have been integrated to provide an exciting new technology which can be applied in the manufacture of PCBs to reduce manufacturing costs and increase flexibility of manufacture.

The value of the paper lies in its ability to provide information on the scope of opportunities for ink jet printing in the PCB manufacturing process through the use of a range of new inks having specific properties. The design and development of highly accurate machinery provides the opportunity to attain the desired print resolution.

Digital ink-jet printing was developed more than two decades ago, to print image directly from the computer on substrates such as paper, film and plastic, etc. In the past decade, digital ink-jet printing has been extensively used in textile applications also due to improvement of ink, software and machinery. Therefore, a comprehensive review of digital ink-jet printing on textiles was conducted. The technical aspects of digital ink-jet printing are addressed and hardware requirements of digital ink-jet printing system for textiles are also reviewed. Specific criteria of ink and substrate for digital ink-jet printing are discussed. On the other hand, problems of printing quality because of textile substrate are also discussed in this paper.

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.

This paper will review digital ink‐jet printing on textiles and the advantages it offers to textile industry and consumers in comparison with conventional printing. The paper also reports on some of the results of a large project, which has been undertaken in the University of Leeds to address a number of issues concerning the problems associated with this technique. One of the important issues associated with digital ink‐jet printing on textiles is speed and reliability, as this has commercial implications for the industry. The research carried out in Leeds has addressed this problem and solutions are proposed which will be covered in detail in this paper. Further research has also been carried out to establish the issues surrounding digital ink‐jet printing and print quality when different types of designs are being printed. The paper will address the results of this research on quality assessment of digital ink‐jet printing on textiles.