 So what are we looking at here? So this is a flexo QD proofing press and so it's actually a flexograph press and here you have a rubber stamping plate, it's actually a photopolymer rubber and what happens is it gets inked by this analogs with silver ink and it transfers onto the high parts of the stamp there and then from there it transfers back onto the film and so using the analogs we can determine how much ink can be applied to the film and of course the Dr. Blade is there to make sure the analogs is metered properly. So you're putting exactly the right amount of ink? Exactly, yeah. How does that work? And if we want well so the analog says little cones cut into it and if the cones are deeper then you put more ink and so this one has a very small very small cones and so it only puts just a little bit of ink down and it makes a very thin film right and that thin film means that we're very efficient with the ink we don't use very much. All right so you work with partners to make some of these? Yeah right so actually you can see their logos here and then of course Dupont provided for us a plate for this this particular film and then actually called Polly is a company that was actually a university and they're doing some image processing and Harper is a guy of course from earlier they're making the proofing press I have right here. What's the image processing that they're doing? So they have to convert it from like a digital file into a an actual piece of plastic right or a piece of rubber and the way they do that is by making a file and then making a very high pixel count bitmap right so they have to make like a 4000 dpi image and that's what uh what Cal Poly was doing there. Nice and where does this fit? Okay so in this machine you just snap it in right here you have these little clamps and then so now we're turning a proofing press into a production press and so from here we'll go after the printing we'll go straight to some drying and then we'll go the final curing and what you have here is is the adfos which is a near-ir dryer you have some intense infrared light and so that actually removes the water vapor from the ink and then here we have the pulse forge which is a photonic curing system the pulse forge 3200 and so you have a pulse of light which centers the metal particles together so I think we'll go ahead and start it up make sure everything's ready. So where would you put the ink? The ink goes right here and actually you can watch him do it so he'll lay the ink just between the analogs and the doctor blade and this is your ink to fill out the ink? That's right that's a pkim brand a pf5500 is the name of the ink. It's not just like a normal ink no not at all. What's going on here? It's a nano part and it's dispersed into a liquid and the solvents are primarily water-based and in a very safe to use and so you can see it he loads it into the pipette and here he'll load it right to the doctor blade so you would have to do this for every how many sheets or you'll see it yeah in a system in production you have a feeding chamber automatically yeah exactly here we just kind of giving a little bit just so we just use just a little bit we can run the demo many many many times okay let's just start it up so here's the print coming out you know you need to make some adjustments to make sure the print is right and then five a second or something like that every five every second five parts every second something like that so go through here it flashes it comes out is this a very precise technology uh how can you get it to you can make a very precise print with flexo depending on the plate that you use you can actually make uh in this case we're actually making about 20 micron lines very fine little lines but depending on the plate that you use you can actually make it even less than and so that's actually where some areas of development are going on right now so let's see an example what what's coming out yeah okay here's what we were making in this case and so this is a just a piano right and so here you have each one is a little is a little wire yeah and when i touch it it it changes the capacitance of that wire and then i turn that signal into music and so in the case of this you have of course the 12 channels right one for c a b so on and of course i can i can play it when i connect it to a device so um can you hold this for a second yeah so there there is a some silver net silver particles as the ink and it's on some kind of plastic yeah right what is the structure down there yeah so this is plastic it's polyester right and we have like a light uh pretreatment and that's for a good adhesion and then uh so it's the material that we buy just from the manufacturer and so you can print file these per second at the speed that you are demonstrating yeah right and actually even faster we can do much faster right because we we uh are just set up here at the trade show so you know we don't want to make too much noise or too much mess but this kind of setup they're running usually at about 600 feet per minute so making these parts you're making what 20 or 30 per second and so uh this one would be connected to some kind of uh electronic exactly right so and you have a connector here where it's called a zip right it's a very small connector you you grab it there and you have a small device which interprets the signals so you you need a little microcontroller but it's a very cheap very common device and uh so the application for this kind of device would be to do a switch right on the on the tv's or on uh your lamps or anything at home you have these little buttons and each one of them is a little contact switch well instead of making a movement to make a contact to a circuit how about instead we make just a little change of capacitance and it makes for a much cheaper switch which has absolutely no wear and tear because when i touch it there's no moving parts for the switch and so it's cheap it's cheap yeah this part is is less than a fraction of a penny and so in this case i get 12 very large electrodes a penny is is one cent yeah one one us sent and this is i don't even know how much less than that right because it's just a little piece of plastic and a couple hundred nanometers of silver ink placed on top of it so this is uh this is printed electronics this is the best of the printer electronics world right now we're like a famous company doing printer electronics right yeah well we think so yeah i mean especially for flexo you know you have a very efficient system to make uh basically to use the silver as efficiently as you possibly can that's key right the silver is expensive everyone knows that but the point is if you use only a little bit of it and use it very efficiently it can actually be really cheap and one of the ways that we get efficiency is with the pulse force right so we give that flash really high intensity pulse of light and it actually centers the metal together right and so now you get a nice conductive tough conductive track leading from here to there with good properties so how uh how many designs are there coming out of this machine like all your customers doing different things yeah yeah so i mean flexo is just one application you know there's also inkjet and their screen and we actually have you know samples of each here's one that we actually did some time ago with with a group that's here called pst and this is a little tiger and in the orange is our copper ink so it's a copper screen printing and that's been put actually with pst's silicon ink and what happens is uh as a function of temperature that you have a difference in the resistance and you can turn that into a temperature signal so uh pst is using your machine so print like five a second or more no no in this case it's screen printing it's a little slower and so we're making the metal and so we're providing to them the metal and then they provide the silicon print right so that's just one application the the copper does yes copper yeah so um how many designs are possible with printer electronics well a lot of different designs right so you one of one of the big really interesting scenes is inkjet right and inkjet is digital right i can put different images in every type and in this case you have again a fairly thin layer of ink maybe one micron maybe two microns yeah sure and so with this you can make you know things like RFID tags and switches RFID tags yeah so that's radio frequency identification right so in this way you have like current moving through there right and for RFID that that current becomes like an electromagnetic wave becomes a radio wave right and you can communicate between a chip that would be placed onto this tag and a base station somewhere else so how are printed the RFID chips is that like is that how most of the RFID chips are made right now currently most RFID chips are still from semiconductor big wafers right and so they take that little chip out and then they place it onto a print so with uh with a high-speed pick-and-place machine and actually an ink like this would be would be used for for RFID so this is a screen print it's a thicker film of silver and what you have here is is some lines of course to test through the resistance but these kinds of applications would be used for RFID it could be used even for lighting even to carry a small amount of power right to make some leds blink or some even some lights go but you're able to do that with your machine you can you do every kind every type of printer electronics or is this specific for conductors yeah usually the the pulse forge has applications to each and the reason is for that we have a lot of control right we have a very intense pulse of light it's short but that the the height and the width of that pulse we can control very precisely we can change it only by one microsecond if we want it usually ranges something from 50 microseconds to 10 milliseconds right and if we wanted to be 521 microseconds we can do that so in this case the other key feature is to keep the bulbs cool right there's a lot of heat inside of this system right and in order to keep it cool we have a system that's over here which is a water cooler and the water cooler is flowing over the bulbs this is a water cooler exactly it's not a server farm or something this one is the power right this is the power supplies each one of these is a capacitor bank to send a pulse of energy into the bulbs right you have the charging power supplies to fill up the capacitor banks and here you have the water cooler right and the water cooler is keeping the bulbs cool you keep them at room temperature then they last a lot longer right and I can predict when they'll fail so I can have a common maintenance cycle so everybody can shut down at the same time and make sure that we don't suddenly break and lose some money right how much are the bulbs so a bulb is maybe costing I don't know $500 or something like that and so you know this should last for a long time in this application the one that we're running right here it's infinite life I don't even know infinite maybe yeah it could be it's a very long time because it's only using about two percent of the bulbs capacity right so we actually haven't had an application where you've had to change the bulbs with that one for screen printing it takes more energy I have to make a longer pulse more intense and so I have to change the bulbs more often maybe 10 million cycles how can you company figure out how to make so precise and powerful lamps how does that work well there's a lot of there's a lot of existing technology and lamp design right so this we're benefiting from from years and years of research of uh in designs of lamps so we're we're basically just making improvements on on those little lamp designs little tweaks here and there but then we're also doing something really unique which is in the water cooling right so water cooling but also particular types of switches you have semiconductor switches that can be very efficient and very precisely tuned is this an example of what people do with your machine this is which part of this is printed in this case you have these lines here on this is actually silvering same as what you have right here so this ink is going in there and they're making a shirt yeah in a t-shirt so I was telling you earlier making lights blink so here you go this is done by Sotemsa which is a research group over in Spain and they're researching how to do wearable technologies right wearable printed electronics but your machine over there it mostly it's printing on plastic right on the often but in the case of something like this we may also use paper right this is a paper roll can go through yeah right of course we can use paper we can use plastic and even sometimes we use glass especially for for screen printing and all right so so this is which generation is this so this one is the is the 3200x2 x2 is meaning that the bulbs are six inches long so that's the length of the bulb and then you stack them side by side to make the width and in this case it has a nine inch wide width so every time we pulse we are pulsing six by nine inches right next pulse six by nine inches is this uh you've done several generations before or yeah well and so the way it kind of turns out is if you want to get started in this kind of processing you start with the 1000 series machines right we have two levels of this machine which is the 1200 and the 1300 and and so the but this this is a different machine but so so what's it called uh this is just smaller prototyping bigger prototyping right right so for batch processing right so you it's drawn out the table here you put your sample on to the table and then it moves in flashes and moves back out right so you the only processing a single print one or two prints uh every minute or something like that so it's a much slower process but what that means is that you get to see okay is this process right for me because I get to test just one or two pieces or even 10 pieces if I want to make 10 000 pieces I need to move to the web and so your customers mostly have both many customers start with this machine and then they move to that machine so you start with the research and then you move to the production this is mass production no this is a mass production machine yeah that's three thousand series yeah enough for the demand for the whole planet but that's the idea yes absolutely you get a lot of density of manufacturing power right and that's the idea you want to buy a machine you can make a lot of parts with and that's exactly the intention of building a machine like this over a web so your customers need to have very attentive engineers also measuring how much light intensity for how long you need all that kind of calculation is so all that's something that they have to one thousand level right they figure out there what they need exactly figure out everything you need to do define your process the one thousand level and of course the machine is also watching how the bulbs doing is is the process correct are the bulbs doing what I think they should be doing so we have this qc using photobolometry right we look at the actual output coming from the bulb and we display it under the screen we say okay that looks good right and then once you have the process to find then you move over to production and in production we have many of the same qc factors going on all the time right every time the pulses fire we look at them and make sure are they okay yeah okay so we move on and it said things from there are exactly compatible over there exactly in fact the same calibration all that stuff are doing their their research and development on one side of the planet they find a series of conditions they send them over to the other side of the planet for production but we can send conditions back and forth and how long does it take to put another design in there and start making it something different it just depends so you're already doing some research based off of the one thousand series and maybe it takes you a week or something like that to define your process and then you send it over here and you get the the mold done right for the the the head and stuff exactly right right well so we're not changing anything about the design of the machine only little digital conditions that the machine uses to create the pulse of light right so for every process if it's screen printing or if it's inkjet they're using the same machine they're just putting in different conditions are you also training the engineers that that that use this machine absolutely so this is the basis of my job one is to define applications for the processes and the next one is to move and install the machine and actually train the engineers how to operate it around the world yeah absolutely so this is uh this has been quite popular absolutely it's quite uh yeah we were installing special machine but i'm guessing you're you're making a bunch yeah well we're basically united states and we're installing machines in germany in uh japan and just recently even in china and other places like that as well so it just depends on where the manufacturing is happening cool