US 4,506,272 AGranted

Thermal printing head

AssigneeMatsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

InventorShoji Arai

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

Loading patent…

Abstract

A very compact thermal printing head which may be manufactured at low cost is proposed. The thermal printing head integrally comprises a given multiple of heaters formed in an array, and a plurality of semiconductor devices each having at least a plurality of transistors which are respectively connected to heaters and a shift register which transfers an image signal for selectively switching the plurality of transistors. Straight lead wires are used to connect the semiconductor devices and the heaters, and L-shaped or inverted L-shaped lead wires are used to connect the semiconductor devices and a set of multi-layer wiring conductors having terminal mount portions of the head. These straight and L-shaped (or inverted L-shaped) lead wires are respectively supported on electrically insulating flexible films obtained by the TAB (tape automated bonding) method.

Claims6

Dependent claims

A thermal printing head comprising:

(a) a base having opposite sides;
(b) a heating element substrate arranged on one side of said base;
(c) a multilayer wiring substrate arranged on the other side of said base;
(d) a multiple of heaters formed in an array on said heating element substrate, one end of each which is connected to a common electrode;
(e) a plurality of semiconductor devices for driving said multiple of heaters, each of said plurality of semiconductor devices comprising at least a plurality of transistors respectively connected to said multiple of heaters and a shift register having memory cells respectively corresponding to said transistors to process an image signal by serial-parallel conversion so as to allow the image signal to selectively switch said transistors;
(f) a set of multi-layer wiring conductors arranged on said multi-layer wiring substrate and having a terminal mount portion and a multi-layer structure at at least a part thereof, said multi-layer wiring conductors being formed on opposite surfaces of the multi-layer wiring substrate;
(g) a set of straight lead wires supported on an electrically insulating flexible film, one end of each of said straight lead wires being connected to the other end of one of said heaters, and the other end of each of said straight lead wires being connected to one terminal of one of said semiconductor devices;
and
(h) a set of L-shaped lead wires supported on another electrically insulating flexible film, one end of each of said L-shaped lead wires being connected to the other end of one of said semiconductor devices, and the other end of each of said L-shaped lead wires being connected to one of said multi-layer wiring conductors.

6 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.