Manufacturing: Screen Printing vs. Laser Ablation

Manufacturing: Screen Printing vs. Laser Ablation

Diabetic test strip manufacturing employs two methods for laying down the electrodes: Screen Printing (Thick Film) and Laser Ablation (Thin Film). When we read the engineering literature, the split was clear: screen printing is what brought the cost of a strip down, while laser ablation is used to control the size of each electrode precisely [4].

Screen Printing

• Screen printing uses carbon and silver inks.
• A squeegee forces the thick ink, called a paste, through a patterned mesh screen onto the strip's plastic base [2].
• It is the industry standard for low-cost production. One review describes it as the most mature printing method for biosensors, used to make glucose test strips at billions of units a year [2], and another credits it with mass production at low cost [3].
• The trade-off is resolution. Screen-printed lines are typically 50 to 200 µm wide, set by the mesh and how the paste flows [2].
• Its electrode surfaces are rougher, and results can vary more from strip to strip, which engineers measure as the coefficient of variation (CV).
• It requires slightly larger blood samples.

Laser Ablation

• Laser ablation starts by sputtering (a vacuum coating process) a thin film of noble metal, such as gold or palladium, onto a plastic substrate.
• A laser then burns away the metal it doesn't need, leaving the electrode pattern behind. What that buys is accurate control over the dimensions of the electrodes [4], with sharper edges than a printed paste line.
• Metal films also conduct electricity better than carbon pastes.
• Small, precisely sized electrodes suit a small sample chamber. Over the history of the meter, the blood needed for one test fell from 25 µL to as little as 0.3 µL [4], though that review doesn't credit the drop to any single manufacturing method.
• Tighter electrode dimensions remove one source of strip-to-strip variation. That isn't the same as a more accurate strip, and we did not find a published study comparing the accuracy of laser-ablated and screen-printed strips head to head.
• It requires higher capital investment than screen printing.

As of October 2026, we have not found a published market analysis showing strip makers moving from screen printing to laser ablation for premium products, so we can't say which way the industry is heading. The accuracy bar did rise. ISO 15197:2013 requires at least 95% of results within ±15 mg/dL of the lab reference below 100 mg/dL and within ±15% at or above 100 mg/dL, up from the 2003 edition's ±15 mg/dL below 75 mg/dL and ±20% at or above 75 mg/dL [5]. Our article on ISO 15197:2013 accuracy standards covers the standard in more detail.