Abstract
This article discusses the design and performance of planar capacitors built as pairs of conductive plates by additive manufacturing as part of an electronic circuit board. This article covers several geometries and layers of parallel plates that allow for different capacitance values, from a few picofarads (pF) to several nanofarads (nF). The dc, ac, and radio frequency (RF) characterization demonstrated superior performance compared to off-the-shelve surface mount device (SMD) capacitors up to 20 GHz. The additively manufactured capacitors exhibit breakdown voltages in excess of 1 kV and subpicoampere leakage currents, while the change in RF impedance changes, as a function of frequency, is a factor of $3\times $ smaller than SMD capacitors.
Highlights
A DDITIVELY manufactured electronic (AME) devices are becoming attractive for the capability to integrate and embed components within the electronic circuit without the need to solder mount such components
This article describes the design and performance of planar capacitors fabricated with multimaterial and multilayered additive manufacturing technology, enabling capacitors with different areas and different layer counts resulting in capacitance values from a few picofarads to several nanofarads
AME circuits can benefit from the better performance demonstrated by capacitors manufactured as part of the electronic circuit board for both dc and radio frequency (RF) frequencies
Summary
A DDITIVELY manufactured electronic (AME) devices are becoming attractive for the capability to integrate and embed components within the electronic circuit without the need to solder mount such components. This article describes the design and performance of planar capacitors fabricated with multimaterial and multilayered additive manufacturing technology, enabling capacitors with different areas and different layer counts resulting in capacitance values from a few picofarads (pF) to several nanofarads (nF). This system uses inkjet for simultaneous deposition of two types of materials, conductive ink (CI) based on silver nanoparticles and dielectric ink (DI) based on photopolymers. The simplicity of changing the structure of each printed layer allows for the creation of difficult or impossible to fabricate structures using standard manufacturing of PCBs. In addition, the capacitors are integrated into the device/board, eliminating the need to mount them as part of the component assembly. Since the measurements are a bulk measurement in the Z -direction, they cannot be directly correlated with the roughness of the film in the x- or y-direction for the insertion losses that could be present in a transmission line
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