IN Brief:
- The €20.7m Series A round will expand HF2 production, support operations, and further LiFT development.
- HF2 deposits solder paste through a digital, non-contact laser process without conventional stencils.
- Digital deposition could shorten PCB assembly changeovers while improving control over demanding package geometries.
Keiron Printing Technologies has raised €20.7m to expand production of its HF2 Laser-Induced Forward Transfer solder-paste printing system and accelerate development of further electronics-assembly equipment.
The Series A round was co-led by Invest-NL, DeepTechXL, and Waves Capital, with participation from Ramphastos Investments, ATUM Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, and TNO Ventures. Funding will support manufacturing scale-up, commercial operations, technical service, and research and development across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific.
HF2 uses a digital, non-contact process to transfer controlled solder-paste deposits onto a printed circuit board. The platform is intended to replace the stencil printer, selected jet-printing processes, and separate solder-paste inspection stages within a single production system.
Conventional stencil printing remains fast and economical at volume, although every product requires a suitable stencil and a stable combination of aperture geometry, paste characteristics, squeegee pressure, separation speed, board support, and environmental control. Fine-pitch devices, mixed package sizes, stepped deposits, and tightly spaced features can force one stencil to accommodate conflicting requirements.
Laser-Induced Forward Transfer takes a different route by moving material from a donor layer to the target location under digital control. Individual deposits can be altered without manufacturing another stencil, allowing paste volume to be adjusted for different component types on the same assembly and revised through software when a design changes.
Keiron is targeting first-pass yields above 95%, compared with an industry reference point of around 60% for difficult assemblies, alongside doubled production uptime and substantially shorter programming. Those figures will face evaluation across solder formulations, board finishes, panel formats, component mixes, and operating environments as installations move into broader production.
The investment arrives while electronics manufacturers are pursuing shorter changeovers and greater control over high-mix assembly. Assel’s recent SMT capacity upgrade concentrated on placement accuracy, efficiency, and faster product transitions; digital solder deposition addresses an earlier stage where an unstable print can create defects that no placement machine can correct.
Bottom-terminated components, fine-pitch packages, power devices, and assemblies combining very small passives with components requiring larger solder volumes all expose the limitations of a uniform process. Too little paste can produce incomplete joints or opens, while excessive deposits increase bridging, voiding, and movement during reflow.
Although inspection systems identify variation after printing, detection alone leaves the process disturbance in place. Closer integration between deposition control and monitoring could shorten the interval between recognising a problem and correcting it, provided calibration, donor-material consistency, throughput, and deposit repeatability remain stable across long runs.
Digital manufacturing is also moving further into prototyping. Itera’s rewritable fluid circuit-board platform is intended to shorten the hardware iteration cycle before manufacture, while Keiron applies similar software-defined flexibility to a production process that has traditionally depended on fixed tooling.
Stencil printing will retain substantial advantages across stable, high-volume products. Its installed base is extensive, materials and controls are mature, and tooling cost becomes small when distributed across large production runs. HF2 will therefore be judged against the total cost of recurring setup, inspection, rework, yield loss, and production delay rather than against stencil price alone.
High-mix lines, new-product introduction, advanced packaging, and complex assemblies provide the clearest initial applications. In those environments, frequent engineering changes or recurring print defects can justify a higher equipment investment when software-controlled deposits reduce tooling and shorten process development.
Qualification will be decisive in automotive, medical, aerospace, and defence production. Manufacturers will require evidence that deposit volume, joint formation, voiding, intermetallic behaviour, and long-term reliability remain controlled, while compatibility with existing solder materials, board handling, traceability systems, and line software will shape integration costs.
Throughput must also be considered across the complete panel rather than one deposit. A highly precise digital process can still become a bottleneck if transfer speed falls behind placement and reflow, particularly on boards containing thousands of terminations. Production trials will need to demonstrate that flexibility can be sustained without shifting lost time to another stage.
Keiron’s funding provides the resources to move LiFT solder printing from specialist deployments into a wider industrial test. Adoption will turn on whether software-defined deposition can match the uptime, material cost, process capability, and line speed expected from established SMT equipment while delivering measurable gains on assemblies that remain difficult to print conventionally.
