How Heidelberg maskless aligner MLA300 is assisting KERAjet

To reduce the batch production from several months to a few days, KERAjet, a pioneer in digital ceramic printing solutions, equipped its R&D microelectronics lab with MLA300 Maskless Aligner.

“For sure we could not be competitive for production against big foundries, but during the scale-up of the production, the high throughput of MLA300 significantly raises the threshold level for switching to external foundries.” says Rafael Vicent, head of the R&D department at KERAjet.

MLA300 is designed for low- and mid-volume manufacturing, for applications where maskless lithography is beneficial such as patterning of substrates with warp or surface topography (e.g. alumina) or prototyping and legacy product manufacturing where the direct writing greatly simplifies and shortens the process.

The MLA300 can integrate up to 4 exposure modules to provide sufficient throughput. The resolution, writing speed, resists and substrate handling can be customised based on the requirements. “MLA300 is one of our most demanding R&D projects ever. Our engineers developed an optical engine that integrates up to four optic modules. It is even possible to combine modules with different wavelengths or resolutions. That means you can customize the MLA300 according to the specific application requirements in terms of resolution, write-speed and substrate handling.” says Steffen Diez, COO of Heidelberg Instruments.

Read the Heidelberg Instruments full text here.