Improving Ink Jet Printers with MEMS

MT5009 - Analysing Hi-Tech Opportunities 1

Memjet Technology

Team Members :

Poh Lai Say HT083353RLow Kok Tat HT083262MMelvin Lim HT093124EChan Wei Siang A0076876


Memjet Office Printer


Continuous inkjetsIdea patented in 1867 by William Thomsen, Lord Kelvin.

1st commercial continuous inkjet medical devices by Siemens in 1951.

Thermal inkjetsDiscovered by Ichiro Endo of Canon in August 1977.

1st commercially thermal inkjet printer by HP in 1984.

Piezoelectric inkjetsInvented by Seiko-Epson in Japan in the late 70s.

Inkjet Technology


Inkjet Technology

Inkjet Technology

Continuous Drop-on-Demand

Binary Deflection

ElmjetScitexImage

Multiple Deflection

VideojetDiconixLinx

Hertz

Iris Graphics

Microdot

Hitachi

Piezoelectric

TektronixSharpEpsonBrother

Thermal

HPCanonLexmarkXerox

Electrostatic

MatsushitaNEC

Acoustic

Xerox

Memjet


Memjet Printhead TechnologyMEMS(Microelectromechanical systems)- The technology of very small mechanical devices driven by electricity - MEMS device ranges between 20µm to 1mm

- Printhead is made up of 11 Integrated Circuit (IC) Chips, with a total of 70,400 nozzles (6,400 per IC Chip) and patented ‘drop triangle’ design- IC Chips are made from Silicon Wafer fabricated by deposition of layer material, patterning via photolithography and then etching to produce the required shapes

0.72mm


Technology Paradigm Shift

Printing Speed: Traditional printer - Printhead scans back and forth as paper is fed through, thus limiting the printing speed as a result. The highest speed that traditional inkjet printer is achieving now is around 30-32 PPM.

Memjet printer - Printhead is stationary while paper is fed through. This is made possible by the page wide Memjet printhead with 70,400 nozzles firing up-to 774 million drops per second, that is about 1 page per second(or 60 PPM).

222.8mm wide



70,400 nozzles/printhead11 kHz nozzle firing rate

1600 dpi resolution1.5 picoliter (pl) per drop

‘Faster’ Printhead : Traditional printer (HP printhead evolution 1985-2006)- 360 million drops per second(high-end DesignJet) 170 million drops per second(home & office HP DeskJet)

Memjet printer (2008)- 774 million drops per second



Ink ejection rate and Moore’s Law:

By looking at the HP’s printhead development timeline, the ink ejected per second from the printhead doubled every 18 months which is similar to Moore’s Law in the semiconductor industry.

Memjet’s Technology (Silicon ICs, 70,400 nozzles, 5 colors)



Smaller ink drops:

Traditional Printer- Around 2-5 picoliters per drops.

Memjet Printhead-The nozzles on the Memjet printhead fire ink drops of between 0.6-1.5 picoliters, depending on the firing rate. Lesser volume of ink is achieved with a smaller ink chamber within the printhead and smaller nozzle width of about 12x24µm. The smaller ink drop also allows it to dry up faster and consume less ink.



Geometric Scaling of Nozzle:

Assuming a drop of ink is a perfect sphere:Volume of sphere = 4/3 πr3

Any reduction in the width(diameter) of the nozzle will effectively reduced the volume of ink drop by a power of 3 thus reducing the overall usage of ink.

Decreasing nozzle size and distance between nozzles will decrease size of print head, thereby reduces cost.

Other Aspects of Scaling in Printhead:

Ability to add printheads horizontally (Short Edge) to increase printing width and vertically (Long Edge) to increase the printing speed or print resolution.

And since there is only one standard-size printhead, there is economies of scale.

11

Value Proposition

MT5009 - Analysing Hi-Tech Opportunities

Superior Printing Speed

Low Running

Cost


Value Proposition

HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 EnterpriseA811

Lexmark Platinum Pro905

Canon Pixma MX7600

HP Color LaserJet CP3525

Canon imageCLASS MF8350Cdn

Memjet Office Printer

Cost of Printer (US$)

180 280 400 649 (Basic Model)

599 500 (Estimated)

Max Resolution B/W (dpi)

1200 x 1200 2400 x 1200 600 x 600 1200 x 600 600 x 600 1600 x 1600

Max Resolution Color (dpi)

4800 x 1200 4800 x 1200 4800 x 1200 1200 x 600 2400 x 600 1600 x 1600

PPM Black 15 (Draft) 25 (Draft) 28 (Draft) 30 (Normal) 21 (Draft) 60 (Normal)30 (Best)

PPM Color 14 (Draft) 21 (Draft) 23 (Draft) 30 (Normal) 21 (Draft) 60 (Normal)30 (Best)

Power Consumption(Watt)

20 32 26 (Copying)70 (Max)

643 (Printing)60 (Ready)

1200 (Max) 30

Picoliter Size(Color)

2-5 2-5 2-5 NA NA 1.5(Max)

Cost per page Black/Color Excl Printer (US$)

0.02/0.07 0.02/0.06 0.05/0.10 0.02/0.20 0.04/0.16 0.01/0.05 (Estimated)

http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/canon-mx7600-vs-memjet/

http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/hp-color-laserjet-cp3525-vs-memjet/

http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/canon-mx7600-vs-memjet/

http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/hp-color-laserjet-cp3525-vs-memjet/


Value Proposition

Superior Printing Speed:

- Print ‘Normal’ quality color print (1600x800dpi) at 60 PPM, or an astonishing 1 full A4 color page per sec. At least twice as fast as its closest rival in the inkjet printer market.

- Print ‘Best’ quality color print (1600x1600dpi) at 30 PPM, which is still faster than most office printers shown in the comparison table.


Value Proposition

Low Running Cost:

Comparing with other inkjet printers- Lower ink consumption : smaller ink drop volume, max 1.5pl vs 2-5pl- Cheaper ink : Memjet ink tanks are design to allows multiple time of refills at authorized OEM partners, without paying extra for ink containers- Low printhead replacement cost : Single printhead designed to last entire printer lifetime- Lower maintenance cost : fewer moving parts as printhead is stationery

Comparing with other laser printers- Lower power consumption : less energy needed to operate printer- Lower cost per page : brings color printing to offices at a cost lower than monochrome laser printer


Printer Business Opportunities

Wide Format Printer :

• Print 8” to 42” wide media• 5 printheads in array• 5 colors per printhead – CMYKK or CCMMY• 30 D-size per min at 1600 x 800 dpi or 1171 m2 per hour with 42” media• 15 D-size per min at 1600 x 1600 dpi or 586 m2 per hour with 42” media• Relatively low hardware cost with laser-fast printing speed in full color

http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/memjet-wide-format-oem-print-engine-label-printing/





Label Printer :

• Print upto 8” wide media• 5 colors printhead – CMYKK• 12 inches per second at 1600 x 800 dpi• 6 inches per second at 1600 x 1600 dpi• High registration accuracy

High Speed Label Printer :

• Print upto 8” wide media• 5 printheads in parallel• 5 colors printhead – CMYKK• 32 inches per second or 2926 m per hour!!!

http://www.memjet.com/technology/video-view/memjet-labels-oem-production-class-print-engine-pre-production/




Wide Format Printer


New Opportunities in Digital In-Production Printing for Memjet Printers:

RetailerBusiness

Product Labels

Convertor

Finished Goods

Print-On-Demand Label Printer

Print-On-Demand Label Printer

Semi-finished Product

Manufacturing

Final Product Manufacturing

Label Printer

DistributionCenter

ROLES REPLACED BY MEMJET PRINTERS !



Advantages of Digital In-Production Printing:

Reduce Cost Lower Lead-time Last Minute Activity More Flexibility• Will reduce the need to make advance purchases and holding inventories of costly pre-printed labels• More space will be available for value-add manufacturing activities rather than storing pre-printed labels• Reduce wastage as companies tends to order labels in excess of requirement due to long turn-around time

• Will significantly reduce the manufacturing lead-time and thus improve product time-to-market

• Specific labeling/marking can be assigned as a ‘last minute’ activity of the manufacturing process• Language/Country specific requirements• Regulatory and regional marketing

• Supply and demand will become better coordinated and fulfilled• Product labels can be proof-read before the manufacturing activities start thus ensuring correctly decorated products all the time


Other Business Opportunities

Digital Newspaper Printing Kiosk:

Laminated Flooring:For printing high resolution photographic images of natural wood flooring before finishing with an extremely hard, clear-coated melamine overlay to protect the printed film.

Replaces human-manned kiosk with automated on-demand printing kiosk



Devices for Fast Data Transfer:

Wide Format Printer – 5 printheads arranged in arrayHigh Speed Label Printer – 5 printheads arranged in series

A gigabit router(1000Mbps) is used to route the print data file from PC to the individual printhead controller. As the printer gets faster and bigger(beyond the current 5 printheads, larger print data files have to be processed within a shorter time, faster transfer speed will be needed. Optical fiber networking with a transfer rate of upto 100Gbps could be the future solution. Thus, there could be business opportunities for suppliers of optical fiber networking cables, networking switches in the future.



New Formulation of Aqueous Ink:

At the current printing speed of 1 page(A4) per second, the current ink used in Memjet have to dry up almost instantaneously. This is to prevent ink smudge on the next print-out that will be stacked over the previous.

This opens up new opportunities for ink suppliers to work out a new formulation of ink that will be able to dry up much quicker than they are now.


Technology Improvement

Higher Resolution & Faster Printing Speed:

In Memjet’s laboratory testing, the printhead has been found to be able to work at a firing rate of upto 100kHz. However, as the firing rate increases, the drop size will be reduced and print quality will not be optimum at current resolution of 1600x1600dpi.

By making the nozzle size smaller, more dots will be able to be squeezed within the 222.8mm overall width of printhead ICs to achieve a higher printhead resolution. Add color redundancy for CCMMYYKK, 8 color channels instead of 5 currently. Provide a more vibrant printout(photo-printing) and dead nozzles compensation.

With smaller and more nozzles in future Memjet printhead, a quicker controller will also be required to drive the printhead to fire more nozzles per second through higher firing rate.

Current controller :32 bit RISC controller, 648 MHz CPU


Thank you!