Supercooled Metals As Low Processing Temperature Conductive Ink (Printed Electronics USA 2017)

SAFI-Tech's supercooled metal inks enable flexible electronics manufacturers to form interconnects or conductive traces without thermal damage. The technology consists of water-balloon-like microparticles of liquid metal solders in a metastable supercooled state. These particles can be mechanically broken or chemically triggered to release the liquid metal, which then rapidly solidifies.

Dr. Ian Tevis is the CTO and Co-founder of SAFI-Tech. He is Materials Chemist with a PhD from Northwestern University. Ian became very familiar with the challenges heat can give in electronics processing during his PhD thesis work on self-assembling small molecule based solar cells. Before starting SAFI-Tech, Ian was a research scientist at NanoIntegris Technologies working on process and product development of carbon nanotube inks. Ian has been working on supercooled liquid metal particle technology for two and a half years, first as a postdoc at Iowa State University and now as the CTO at SAFI-Tech.

SAFI-Tech's supercooled metal inks enable flexible electronics manufacturers to form interconnects or conductive traces without thermal damage. The technology consists of water-balloon-like microparticles of liquid metal solders in a metastable supercooled state. These particles can be mechanically broken or chemically triggered to release the liquid metal, which then rapidly solidifies. SAFI-Tech's vision is to provide supercooled metal technology to electronics manufacturers to solve issues caused by high temperature processes . SAFI-Tech was award the Technical Development Materials Award at the 2016 IDTechEx Show.