A printing process by which ink is applied to a surface by forcing it through a fine mesh screen made of silk or a synthetic substitute. Screen printing uses silk or other fabric stretched tightly over a frame. Images are created by blocking parts of the screen with stencils created by hand-drawn or photographic techniques. Screen printing is one of the oldest printing techniques. Basic equipment costs little and large amounts can be printed in one time. Most of today's printed electronics consists of conductive patterns in carbon or silver inks where high speed printing technology has not been able to cope with the inks or thick enough layers for the requisite conductance could not be made at one pass. Screen printing is therefore used for membrane keyboards, RFID antennas and other applications. Rotary screen printing is sometimes preferred because it gets over the very modest throughput of conventional screen printing. Screen printing is also used for dielectric, phosphor and passivation layers of ac electroluminescent printed wide area displays. Many faster printing processes cannot cope with wide areas.
See the IDTechEx report Introduction to Printed Electronics