Printhead IC with more than 10000 nozzles in the exposure area of a photo-imaging device

Abstract

A printhead integrated circuit for an inkjet printer that has a monolithic wafer substrate supporting an array of droplet ejectors for ejecting drops of printing fluid onto print media. Each droplet ejector has nozzle and an actuator for ejecting a drop of printing fluid the nozzle. The array is formed on the monolithic wafer substrate by a succession of photolithographic etching and deposition steps involving a photo-imaging device that exposes an exposure area to light focused to project a pattern onto the monolithic substrate. The array has more than 10000 of the droplet ejectors configured to be encompassed by the exposure area. The invention arranges the nozzle array such that the droplet ejector density is very high and the number of exposure steps required is reduced.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.