Comparative Study of Inkjet-Printed Silver Conductive Traces With Thermal and Electrical Sintering Escobedo Araque, Pablo Carvajal Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Banqueri Ozáez, Jesús Martínez Olmos, Antonio Capitán Vallvey, Luis Fermín Palma López, Alberto José Electrical sintering Inkjet printing Microstrip transmission line Silver nanoparticle ink Thermal sintering Thermal sintering has traditionally been the most popular sintering method to enhance conductivity after the printing process in the manufacturing of printed electronics. Nevertheless, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in electrical sintering as an alternative method to overcome some of the limitations of thermal curing. This paper makes a comparative study of both sintering methods in terms of surface morphology, electrical dc conductance, and radiofrequency performance for different applied voltage waveforms. To this end, microstrip transmission lines have been inkjet-printed using nanoparticle-based silver ink on flexible polyimide substrate. The traces have been tested under different sintering conditions, achieving electrical sintering resistivity values only 2.3 times higher than that of bulk silver. This implies a 62% reduction in comparison with the best resistivity value achieved using thermal sintering in our samples. The main novelty of this contribution lies in the analysis of RF behavior as a function of electrical sintering conditions. Lower resistivities have been achieved with slower voltage ramps or allowing higher density current during sintering. It has also been proved that electrically sintered lines have similar RF performance than high-temperature thermally sintered lines in terms of insertion losses, regardless of their very different surface topology. Therefore, we can take advantage of the benefits that electrical sintering offers over thermal sintering regarding significant shorter sintering times maintaining suitable RF performance. 2020-01-29T07:38:25Z 2020-01-29T07:38:25Z 2018-12-28 journal article Escobedo, P., Carvajal, M. A., Banqueri, J., Martínez-Olmos, A., Capitán-Vallvey, L. F., & Palma, A. J. (2018). Comparative Study of Inkjet-Printed Silver Conductive Traces With Thermal and Electrical Sintering. IEEE Access, 7, 1909-1919. http://hdl.handle.net/10481/59218 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2887113 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ open access Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España IEEE