Meco Flex Antenna Plating System (FAP): a unique cost-effective additive process for RFID antenna manufacturing, Flexible PCB and Copper Clad Laminate (CCL).

Low Cost RFID Antenna Production

Antenna inlays for RFID passive tags are currently made of etch copper or aluminum. In other cases the antennas are printed using costly conductive ink. Neither production method is meeting the low cost production requirements of high reliability RFID tags.
  

Additive Copper Process

Meco has developed an additive copper process for plating low cost antennas or other components onto flexible substrate. The required pattern should be printed onto the substrate material and then copper is plated on top of it. Contrary to etching processes, copper is only plated where it is actually needed while with etching a lot of copper is subtracted (etched) which leads to waste and a higher cost.
  

Conductive Ink for Seed Layer Printing

For printing the seed layer pattern a conductive ink (e.g a low-cost non-silver ink) is used. Alternatively the seed layer could also be made using an electroless Nickel-Copper process. The seed layer is only used as a starting layer for the copper plating process. The conductivity is therefore achieved with the plated copper layer.

  

High Product Flexibility/No Change-Over Time

The FAP system can handle a wide range of antenna designs (HF and UHF) or other device structures, without any product related parts resulting in zero downtime when changing over from one design to the other. Depending on the type of antenna, for UHF typically a copper thickness of 2-3 micron is needed while for HF antennas 10-12 micron copper thickness leads to optimum antenna performance.