Improving Ink Jet Printers with MEMS

Memjet Technology
Team Members :
Poh Lai Say HT083353R
Low Kok Tat HT083262M
Melvin Lim HT093124E
Chan Wei Siang A0076876
MT5009 - Analysing Hi-Tech Opportunities
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Memjet Office Printer
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Inkjet Technology
Continuous inkjets
Idea patented in 1867 by William Thomsen, Lord Kelvin.
1st commercial continuous inkjet medical devices by Siemens in 1951.
Thermal inkjets
Discovered by Ichiro Endo of Canon in August 1977.
1st commercially thermal inkjet printer by HP in 1984.
Piezoelectric inkjets
Invented by Seiko-Epson in Japan in the late 70s.
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Inkjet Technology
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Inkjet Technology
Continuous
Drop-on-Demand
Binary Deflection
Multiple Deflection
Hertz
Microdot
Piezoelectric
Thermal
Electrostatic
Acoustic
Elmjet
Scitex
Image
Videojet
Diconix
Linx
Iris Graphics
Hitachi
Tektronix
Sharp
Epson
Brother
HP
Canon
Lexmark
Xerox
Matsushita
NEC
Xerox
Memjet

MemjetPrinthead Technology
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MEMS(Microelectromechanical systems)
The technology of very small mechanical devices driven by electricity
MEMS device ranges between 20µm to 1mm
Printhead is made up of 11 Integrated Circuit (IC) Chips, with a total of 70,400 nozzles (6,400 per IC Chip) and patented ‘drop triangle’ design
IC Chips are made from Silicon Wafer fabricated by deposition of layer material, patterning via photolithography and then etching to produce the required shapes
0.72mm

Technology Paradigm Shift
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Printing Speed:
Traditional printer
- Printhead scans back and forth as paper is fed through, thus limiting the printing speed as a result. The highest speed that traditional inkjet printer is achieving now is around 30-32 PPM.
Memjet printer
- Printhead is stationary while paper is fed through. This is made possible by the page wide Memjetprinthead with 70,400 nozzles firing up-to 774 million drops per second, that is about 1 page per second(or 60 PPM).
222.8mm wide

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‘Faster’ Printhead :
Traditional printer (HP printhead evolution 1985-2006)
360 million drops per second(high-end DesignJet)
170 million drops per second(home & office HP DeskJet)
Memjet printer (2008)
774 million drops per second
70,400 nozzles/printhead
11 kHz nozzle firing rate
1600 dpi resolution
1.5 picoliter (pl) per drop

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Ink ejection rate and Moore’s Law:
By looking at the HP’s printhead development timeline, the ink ejected per second from the printhead doubled every 18 months which is similar to Moore’s Law in the semiconductor industry.
Memjet’s Technology (Silicon ICs, 70,400 nozzles, 5 colors)

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Smaller ink drops:
Traditional Printer
- Around 2-5picoliters per drops.
MemjetPrinthead
The nozzles on the Memjetprinthead fire ink drops of between 0.6-1.5 picoliters, depending on the firing rate. Lesser volume of ink is achieved with a smaller ink chamber within the printhead and smaller nozzle width of about 12x24µm. The smaller ink drop also allows it to dry up faster and consume less ink.

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Geometric Scaling of Nozzle:
Assuming a drop of ink is a perfect sphere:
Volume of sphere = 4/3 πr3
Any reduction in the width(diameter) of the nozzle will effectively reduced the volume of ink drop by a power of 3 thus reducing the overall usage of ink.
Decreasing nozzle size and distance between nozzles will decrease size of print head, thereby reduces cost.
Other Aspects of Scaling in Printhead:
Ability to add printheads horizontally (Short Edge) to increase printing width and vertically (Long Edge) to increase the printing speed or print resolution.
And since there is only one standard-size printhead, there is economies of scale.

Value Proposition
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Low Running Cost
Superior Printing Speed

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Value Proposition
http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/canon-mx7600-vs-memjet/
http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/hp-color-laserjet-cp3525-vs-memjet/

Value Proposition
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Superior Printing Speed:
Print ‘Normal’ quality color print (1600x800dpi) at 60 PPM, or an astonishing 1 full A4 color page per sec. At least twice as fast as its closest rival in the inkjet printer market.
Print ‘Best’ quality color print (1600x1600dpi) at 30 PPM, which is still faster than most office printers shown in the comparison table.

Value Proposition
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Low Running Cost:
Comparing with other inkjet printers
Lower ink consumption : smaller ink drop volume, max 1.5pl vs 2-5pl
Cheaper ink : Memjet ink tanks are design to allows multiple time of refills at authorized OEM partners, without paying extra for ink containers
Low printhead replacement cost : Single printhead designed to last entire printer lifetime
Lower maintenance cost : fewer moving parts as printhead is stationery
Comparing with other laser printers
Lower power consumption : less energy needed to operate printer
Lower cost per page : brings color printing to offices at a cost lower than monochrome laser printer

Printer Business Opportunities
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Wide Format Printer :
Print 8” to 42” wide media
5 printheads in array
5 colors per printhead – CMYKK or CCMMY
30 D-size per min at 1600 x 800 dpi or 1171 m2 per hour with 42” media
15 D-size per min at 1600 x 1600 dpi or 586 m2 per hour with 42” media
Relatively low hardware cost with laser-fast printing speed in full color
http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/memjet-wide-format-oem-print-engine-label-printing/

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Label Printer :
Print upto 8” wide media
5 colors printhead – CMYKK
12 inches per second at 1600 x 800 dpi
6 inches per second at 1600 x 1600 dpi
High registration accuracy
High Speed Label Printer :
Print upto 8” wide media
5 printheads in parallel
5 colors printhead – CMYKK
32 inches per second or
2926 m per hour!!!
http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/memjet-labels-oem-production-class-print-engine-pre-production/

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New Opportunities in Digital In-Production Printing for Memjet Printers:
Finished Goods
Distribution
Center
Label Printer
Wide Format Printer
Product Labels Convertor
ROLES REPLACED BY MEMJET PRINTERS !
Final Product Manufacturing
Print-On-Demand Label Printer
Retailer
Business
Semi-finished Product Manufacturing
Print-On-Demand Label Printer

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Advantages of Digital In-Production Printing:
Reduce Cost
Lower Lead-time
Last Minute Activity
More Flexibility
Will reduce the need to make advance purchases and holding inventories of costly pre-printed labels
More space will be available for value-add manufacturing activities rather than storing pre-printed labels
Reduce wastage as companies tends to order labels in excess of requirement due to long turn-around time
Specific labeling/marking can be assigned as a ‘last minute’ activity of the manufacturing process
Language/Country specific requirements
Regulatory and regional marketing
Supply and demand will become better coordinated and fulfilled
Product labels can be proof-read before the manufacturing activities start thus ensuring correctly decorated products all the time
Will significantly reduce the manufacturing lead-time and thus improve product time-to-market

Other Business Opportunities
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Digital Newspaper Printing Kiosk:
Replaces human-manned kiosk with automated on-demand printing kiosk
Laminated Flooring:
For printing high resolution photographic images of natural wood flooring before finishing with an extremely hard, clear-coated melamine overlay to protect the printed film.

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Devices for Fast Data Transfer:
Wide Format Printer – 5 printheads arranged in array
High Speed Label Printer – 5 printheads arranged in series
A gigabit router(1000Mbps) is used to route the print data file from PC to the individual printhead controller. As the printer gets faster and bigger(beyond the current 5 printheads, larger print data files have to be processed within a shorter time, faster transfer speed will be needed. Optical fiber networking with a transfer rate of upto 100Gbps could be the future solution. Thus, there could be business opportunities for suppliers of optical fiber networking cables, networking switches in the future.

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New Formulation of Aqueous Ink:
At the current printing speed of 1 page(A4) per second, the current ink used in Memjet have to dry up almost instantaneously. This is to prevent ink smudge on the next print-out that will be stacked over the previous.
This opens up new opportunities for ink suppliers to work out a new formulation of ink that will be able to dry up much quicker than they are now.

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Technology Improvement
Higher Resolution & Faster Printing Speed:
In Memjet’s laboratory testing, the printhead has been found to be able to work at a firing rate of upto 100kHz. However, as the firing rate increases, the drop size will be reduced and print quality will not be optimum at current resolution of 1600x1600dpi.
By making the nozzle size smaller, more dots will be able to be squeezed within the 222.8mm overall width of printhead ICs to achieve a higher printhead resolution. Add color redundancy for CCMMYYKK, 8 color channels instead of 5 currently. Provide a more vibrant printout(photo-printing) and dead nozzles compensation.
With smaller and more nozzles in future Memjetprinthead, a quicker controller will also be required to drive the printhead to fire more nozzles per second through higher firing rate.
Current controller :
32 bit RISC controller, 648 MHz CPU

Thank you!
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Improving Ink Jet Printers with MEMS

by Jeffrey Funk: Creating New Industries on Apr 24, 2011

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Improving Ink Jet Printers with MEMS Presentation Transcript