- 07 September 2006 -

Oki Group World's First Thin-Film-Bonding Technology in Volume

Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd., and OKI Printing Solutions (the brand name for Oki Data Corporation), have developed "Epi Film Bonding" (EFB) technology in which thin films are released and bonded on dissimilar materials. Oki Group is the world's first to succeed in high volume production of LED printheads using the EFB technology.

OKI Printing Solutions developed its unique LED array chips for LED printer printheads. In conventional LED printheads, LED array chips and IC driver chips are mounted on a printed circuit board and are connected by bonding wires. However, high-density wire bonding and large bonding pads limit the density of LED arrays and printing resolutions.
In the newly developed EFB technology, epifilm LED array chips are bonded with the Si IC wafer by utilizing the intermolecular bonding force. This allows us to produce higher-density and higher-layer semiconductor devices, leading to various high-speed and low-power compound devices. Oki Group also made efforts in shrinking the size of driver IC chips and LED array chips, reducing the density of bonding wires, and reducing the number of chips. The EFB technology also leads to reduced fabrication cost and material cost.

The C3400n, OKI Printing Solutions' high-speed and compact color LED printer adopts the new LED head printheads.

"Epi Film Bonding is a promising technology for the integration of dissimilar materials," said Mikihiko Maeno, President and CEO of Oki Data Corporation. "The volume of the new 600dpi LED printhead is half of that of the conventional LED printheads, and will be equipped in our color and monochrome LED printers that are planned for shipment. By developing this technology further, OKI Printing Solutions plans to develop ultra small printheads of 1200dpi or more to enable higher resolution printing."

Oki Electric, on the other hand, will continue to research this technology to provide smaller, lower power consumption and lower cost semiconductor ICs. Employing the EFB technology eliminates the wire bonding and die-bonding processes, which enable Oki to manufacture higher density compound devices using only photolithography processes. In addition, Oki plans to research super small LED displays.

"EFB technology enables us to make higher density, multi-layered, faster speed, and lower power consumption semiconductors, which brings possibilities in developing various compound circuit ICs," said Harushige Sugimoto, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Oki Electric. "Because this technology has so much potential, we will apply this technology beyond semiconductors. We have launched a research unit that includes our R&D team and other affiliated companies to look into adopting this technology to bond dissimilar materials."

Oki Group will announce this technology at the International Conference on Solid State Devices and Materials (SSDM 2006) in Yokohama Japan, starting from September 13, and at the 22nd International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies, and Digital Fabrication 2006 in Denver, Colorado, starting from September 17, 2006. Oki's paper on the EFB technology was published in Electronics Letters Vol. 42, issue 15, on July 20, 2006.

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