SCALE stands for Self-Aligned Capillarity Assisted Lithography for Electronics. In SCALE, micro-scale capillaries, reservoirs and device structures are molded into a coated thermoset material on a web by UV imprint lithography. Electronic inks are then delivered to the reservoirs by drop-on-demand inkjet dispensers, and the inks, drawn into and along the channels by capillarity, fill relief patterns in the thermoset. Importantly, all of the spatial information is encoded in this first step from a high-resolution stamp created by Si master that was patterned with photolithography. The process is self-aligned because multiple inks can be delivered sequentially to cavities engineered into a multilevel capillary network, to form, upon drying, stacked layers of electronic materials. Notably, the necessary precision for the ink dispensing (printing) process is at the size scale of the reservoir, not the size scale of the device. SCALE as an R2R process that has both high-throughput and is scalable to large areas.
