Simon Rihm | Notion Systems GmbH: Your inkjet printer is limited to 20-micron features. How can we print at 5 microns or less for next-gen micro-displays and electronics?

Why does conventional EHD printing fail on real-world, non-flat surfaces? The secret is a MEMS innovation that decouples drop ejection from flight.

A major challenge in traditional EHD printing is its extreme sensitivity to the substrate. The process typically relies on a single electric field established between the nozzle and the substrate to both form and guide the droplet. Consequently, any variation in the substrate's topography, height, or material properties (e.g., the presence of metal lines versus dielectric regions) will disturb this field, leading to inconsistent drop formation, poor placement accuracy, and unreliable printing.

Scrona's technology solves this problem by fundamentally re-architecting the printhead using MEMS fabrication. They integrate the ejection electrode directly into the printhead chip, in very close proximity to the nozzle. This creates a highly localized, strong, and precisely controllable electric field for droplet *ejection* that is almost entirely independent of the global field between the printhead and the substrate.

With this innovation, the primary role of the external field is simply to *guide* the already-formed droplet to the surface, not to create it. This decoupling of ejection and guidance makes the printing process incredibly robust and insensitive to substrate topography and material variations. Furthermore, the MEMS-based approach allows for easy parallelization, scaling from single nozzles to high-density arrays with very small nozzle-to-nozzle pitch, which is critical for achieving high-throughput industrial manufacturing.

In this short video, you can learn:
* The critical flaw of traditional EHD: its sensitivity to substrate topography and materials.
* Scrona's key innovation: integrating ejection electrodes into a MEMS chip at the nozzle.
* How this MEMS integration decouples drop ejection from drop guidance, enabling robust, scalable, and high-resolution printing.

📋 **Clip Abstract** This clip reveals the critical weakness of conventional EHD printing—its sensitivity to the substrate—and explains Scrona's breakthrough solution. By integrating ejection electrodes into a MEMS-based printhead, they decouple drop formation from guidance, enabling robust, high-resolution printing on complex surfaces and paving the way for scalable manufacturing.
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Is photolithography obsolete? How additive printing can slash 5 process steps into 1 for electronics manufacturing.

The traditional way to pattern functional layers in electronics is through a multi-step subtractive process rooted in photolithography. This involves coating a full layer of material, applying a photoresist, exposing the resist with UV light through a mask, developing it, etching the underlying functional layer, and finally stripping the remaining resist. This complex, material-intensive, and wasteful process chain must be repeated for every single layer in a device, contributing significantly to cost and production time.

Additive inkjet printing offers a radical simplification by depositing material only where it is needed. One powerful approach is to directly print the etch resist, which immediately eliminates several steps from the conventional lithographic workflow, such as resist coating and exposure. This hybrid method maintains the integrity of well-established functional layers while streamlining the patterning process, provided the required resolution is within the printer's capability.

The ultimate goal, or "holy grail," of additive electronics is to bypass the etch resist and bulk deposition entirely. By directly printing the functional material—be it a conductive ink for interconnects, a dielectric for insulation, or an active material for a sensor or display pixel—the manufacturing process is condensed from five or more steps down to a single, efficient printing and curing step. This represents a paradigm shift towards more sustainable, cost-effective, and agile electronics production.

In this short video, you can learn:
* The 5 key steps in a traditional subtractive photolithography process chain.
* How inkjet printing can be used as a hybrid approach to pattern etch resists more efficiently.
* The concept of direct-write printing, where functional materials are deposited to create devices in a single step.

📋 **Clip Abstract** This clip contrasts the complex, multi-step subtractive photolithography process with the efficiency of additive inkjet printing. It explores two key additive strategies: printing etch resists to simplify existing workflows and directly printing functional materials to revolutionize device fabrication.
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