T-jet: a novel thermal inkjet printhead with monolithically fabricated nozzle plate on SOI wafer

Abstract

A novel thermal inkjet printhead with monolithically fabricated nickel nozzle plate on SOI wafer has been proposed for the first time. A chamber and a restrictor are implemented on the 40 /spl mu/m thick top-silicon layer, and a nozzle plate covering heater layers are monolithically fabricated on them. Unlike the general back-shooters, the inkjet printhead reported here is a kind of back-shooter, which has a chamber and a restrictor with arbitrary shape by utilizing the silicon dioxide etch-stop layers in the bottom and sidewalls of chamber. Moreover, nozzle plating mold process, followed by placing the chamber underneath the heater layer, is performed on a planar surface, resulting in more uniform and reliable control of nozzle size. The new design was applied for monochrome inkjet printhead, which has 56 nozzles in 2 columns with real 600NPI(nozzle per inch), and showed good performances such as a drop velocity of 12 m/s, a drop volume of 30 pl, and a maximum firing frequency of 12 kHz for single nozzle ejection. From nozzle by nozzle inspection, we observed the uniformity variation of less than 4% in drop speed as well as drop volume. The monolithic fabrication process resulted in a good uniformity and is expected to have superior manufacturing yield to the nozzle assembly process.