While the conventional electronics like computers and smartphones is built around silicon integrating billions of transistors and is manufactured using complex, costly and wasteful processes in multi-billion dollar foundries , The printed and flexible electronics aim to replace this by “organic” semiconductors which are long chains of thousands of repeating molecules (a plastic), made with materials based on carbon. Organic semiconductors can be made to be soluble, and can be turned into an ink.
This means it’s possible to print electronic circuits, with the potential to manufacture components as fast as printing newspapers. The conductive ink is typically used to make a conductive trace or a simple component (like an antenna) which is printed onto Thermoplastic Polyurethanes (TPUs), polyester or kapton. A printer would do this by applying different inks onto the film. As the inks dried, they would turn into wires, transistors, capacitors, LEDs and all the other things needed to make displays and circuits. This fast-growing technology makes it possible to print circuits, sensors, memory, batteries and displays, all onto thin, lightweight, flexible substrates.
Printed and Flexible electronics have already started to appear in our daily lives, for example in car manufacturing with printed aerials, smart textiles with pressure sensors to recognize seat occupancy and self-dimming rearview mirrors, or in the medical field with medical test strips with diagnostic electrodes. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a flexible wearable sensor that can accurately measure a person’s blood alcohol level from sweat and transmit the data wirelessly to a laptop, smartphone or other mobile device.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed “optoelectronic skin”, with an ultra-thin, flexible LED display that can be worn on the back of your hand. China has developed a new electronic paper, heralded as “the world’s first graphene electronic paper,” by Chen Yu, general manager of Guangzhou OED Technologies. The material can be used to create hard or flexible graphene displays, used in electronic products such as e-readers and wearable smart devices.
Printed and flexible electronics have thus far failed to achieve widespread adoption due to significant unresolved technical challenges. Major gaps exist between expectations and performance of printed electronics in the areas of logic, memory, analog circuitry, power, and light generation. Flexible Hybrid Systems is a Combination of flexible printed materials and flexible silicon-based ICs to create a new class of flexible electronics.
The convergence of the use of PFE, with its advantages in available envelope and format, with the performance of conventional electronics has become known as the hybrid approach. A PFE hybrid is created when nonprinted technologies, such as single crystalline silicon ICs, are integrated with PFE. Flexible hybrid integration of printed electronics and conventional silicon ICs has become an accepted near-term solution for flexible system commercialization.
FHE leads the next revolution in electronics; it is the technology that will enable much of the Internet of Things and a generation of electronics in novel forms and mediums. FHE enables the attachment of ultra-thin semiconductor/sensor devices to flexible, conformable, stretchable substrates, such as fabrics or aircraft wings, or to flexible systems such as soft robotic exoskeletons and prosthetics. These technologies can be leveraged to improve devices and components by reducing the footprint and volume, directly applying them to an item or substrate, and integrating devices into common current products, says NextFlex.
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