Manufacture of ink jet printheads
AssigneeXaar Technology Limited
InventorsRobert Alan Harvey, Stephen Temple
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Ink jet printhead components are formed initially by bonding together a grooved base wafer and a suitable cover wafer, the area of the bonding wafer assembly being sufficient to provide a 14.times.14 array of components. Using a datum formation, the wafer assembly is divided into strips and linear processing steps are conducted, such as applying nozzle plates and laser ablating nozzles. Each strip can then be divided to form separate printhead components.
Claims60
A method of making pulsed droplet deposition heads each having a predetermined number of droplet liquid channels comprising the steps of surface area processing on a wafer scale to form a rectangular array of bonded head components, sectioning said rectangular array to form strips each comprising two or more bonded head components in a linear array;
- and linear processing of a plurality of said linear arrays of bonded head components including forming a nozzle for each channel.
A method of making ink jet printhead components, each having N parallel ink channels of length L terminating in respective nozzles, comprising the steps of providing a base wafer;
- processing the base wafer to define n.times.N parallel groove formations of a length in excess of m.times.L, where m and n are integers greater than one;
- providing a cover over said base wafer in an integral wafer assembly, with the cover serving to close portions of said groove formations to form channels;
- sectioning said wafer assembly along parallel first section lines perpendicular to said groove formations to form m strips each sectionable along second section lines parallel to said groove formations to form n printhead components;
- and applying to each of the said strips, at the location of a first section line, a nozzle plate to define said nozzles.
A method of making ink jet printhead components, each having N parallel ink channels of length L terminating in respective nozzles, comprising the steps of providing a base wafer;
- processing the base wafer to define n.times.N parallel groove formations of a length in excess of m.times.L, where n is an integer and m is an integer greater than 4, the section of each groove formation varying along the length thereof with alternating mirror reversed groove segments;
- providing a cover over said base wafer in an integral wafer assembly, with the cover serving to close portions of said groove formations to form channels separated by channel walls;
- sectioning said wafer assembly along parallel first section lines perpendicular to said groove formations to form m strips, the first section lines alternating odd and even with said groove segments;
- applying to each of the said strips, at the location of a first odd section line, a nozzle plate to define said nozzles;
- and, where n is greater than 1, sectioning each strip along second section lines parallel to said groove formations to form n printhead components.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.