Adhesive for bonding voice coil motors in smartphone camera assemblies

Voice coil motors (VCMs) have been essential to smartphone camera assemblies over the last decade, providing features such as image stabilisation and autofocus. DELO offers DELO DUALBOND LT2221 as a universal adhesive for over 50 bonding tasks in VCM manufacturing. Curing fully at just 60C requires less energy than competing products to form an effective bond, making minimal impact on the temperature-sensitive substrates used in VCMs.

VCMs are incredibly small motors, with components measuring mere millimetres. They are mostly made of temperature-sensitive materials. Assembling them comes with many stringent temperature and quality requirements, making it important to find the right adhesive to establish these bonds. This product is a dual-curing adhesive whose highlight is its low curing temperature of just 60C, making it an excellent adhesive solution for many consumer electronics applications.

This low-viscosity adhesive can create very fine bond lines, which is beneficial for bonding components as small as those in VCMs. With a compression shear strength of up to 8MPa on LCP, it is as strong an adhesive as it is versatile.

The adhesive provides extremely fast assembly processes. When using high-intensity DELOLUX curing lamps, it can be light-fixed in just 0.5 seconds, a key benefit given the many bonding tasks in a VCM. Heat-curing all shadowed areas to attain final strength can be done all at once, for example, in 90 minutes at 60C.

”We have a long history of working hands-on with camera module manufacturers to bring them tailor-made solutions, particularly with regard to active alignment,” explains Maximilian Baum, head of product management for consumer electronics assembly and equipment at DELO. “With this universal, yet high-end adhesive, our customers will be able to use it for almost all of the dozens of bonding tasks in a VCM – something that is rare in today’s highly specialised high-tech manufacturing.”

The adhesive and other camera and optical solutions will be displayed at the upcoming CIOE 2024 in Hall 3, Booth 3A40-9, in Shenzhen, China, from September 11-13.