Printing lines of nanometallic ink for conductive electronic traces

Lines of nanometallic silver ink were printed using both a GIX Microplotter and a GIX Microplotter desktop, then annealed to form microscale conductive traces. The nanometallic silver inks were standard inkjet-compatible suspensions obtained from Cabot. Regular wiring patterns were drawn using the SonoDraw illustration software that comes bundled with the Microplotters. Inks were loaded into a Microplotter, and lines were drawn on the surface by the SonoGuide control software following the previously drawn patterns. After printing, the samples were annealed at 100 C for an hour to transform the lines into solid metal wires.