In today's electronic industry, manufacturers are continuously improving capital utilization, developing flexible manufacturing processes, reduce changeover time and improving yield and throughput. Interest in rapid prototyping and 3-D fabrication capabilities are rapidly increasing, and a number of candidate direct writing technologies are in development to meet these demands.

This work studies material systems used by data driven materials deposition (DDMD) technologies for potential low temperature reel-to-reel high volume manufacturing on low cost substrates. Characterization results of fabricated discrete and RF devices using commercially available micro dispensing and ink jet systems will be discussed. Material rheological properties, deposition process characterization, deposition repeatability, fabricated device reliability and electrical performance will be presented. The test vehicles contain resistors and capacitors, transmission lines, open and short series stub filters, and half-wavelength resonators. The material/substrate compatibility will be demonstrated through environmental conditioning of the test vehicles. In addition, a cost estimate for using micro dispensing technologies was conducted to compare current manufacturing technologies to DDMD.