Vacuum chucking assist sheet for fixing flexible sheets during the printing process

A vacuum chuck is often used to fix substrates in the field of electronic device fabrication including printing of the device electrodes. A conventional vacuum chuck plate locally sucks only where suction holes exist. However, when we employ a film as the substrate to be printed, suction from the holes causes the film distortion, which results in misprinting. Thus, we have newly developed a chucking assist sheet to fix a film substrate on a vacuum chuck stage for high-quality electrode printing. When printing is performed, the sheet is located between the film substrate and the vacuum chuck stage. The developed sheet is composed of lower and upper layers of woven stainless steel mesh and non-woven fabric, respectively, and such a structure can significantly decrease misprinting resulting from the film distortion caused by suction. In the present paper, we present the design concept of this chucking assist sheet and details of its features.