Innovations Festival: Printed, Hybrid, 3D, InMold, Textile Electronics

ACI Material’s Stretchable Electronics (SE) product portfolio offers a complete solution for durable wearable electronics. The products are printed on thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) films which can be bonded to fabrics. This results in devices that stretch without cracking and maintain excellent electrical properties satisfying the harsh demands of wearable electronics. Early to market stretchable conductors have a narrow scope of application due to limited stretchability without cracking. ACI’s product have a superior combination of electrical performance, resistance to fatigue during cyclic elongation, and excellent recovery. Examples of use in biometric sensors and fixed resistance heaters will be shown.

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Organic photovoltaic (OPV) technologies have been steadily moving towards market-ready applications in the past decade due to rapid evolutions in materials discovery, device stack engineering and processing strategies. For instance, OPV technologies being tunable, flexible, and semi-transparent, are ideal candidates for photovoltaic modules for indoor energy harvesting and integration into buildings (BIPV). Materials innovation is at the forefront of the quest towards reaching better power conversion efficiency (PCE). While this innovation is mostly focused on reaching a higher efficiency level, the industry has challenges of its own in its materials selection. At Brilliant Matters, we believe that addressing industrial figures of merits, such as printability and synthetic sustainability, is key to enabling the lab-to fab transition.

The CondAlign anisotropic conductive film is an adhesive (ACF) that bonds electronic components at room temperature and low pressure. With mechanical properties like softness, flexibility and good adhesiveness, achieved by efficient use of the conductive particles, this product addresses a key challenge in the FHE area; how to attach components to flexible substrates at room temperature.

Finding sustainable alternative conductive materials to silver is growing in demand. Copper is the next best conductive material, extremely abundant and much cheaper compared to silver and thus is a prime candidate moving forward. DTI has developed several micro and nano copper particles and has demonstrated industrial production of up to 10 kg per day. This talk will showcase the reactor technology DTI has developed, consisting of both a material synthesis reactor as well as filtration system, for automated production of micro/nanomaterials, for printed electronic application, as well as preliminary results for copper based inks produced using produced particles.

DuPont™ GreenTape™ 9KC Low-Temperature Co-fire Ceramic (LTCC) tape and silver (Ag) metallization was used to fabricate an antenna-in-package (AiP) radio frequency front end (RFFE) module operating at 28 GHz. DuPont collaborated with ITRI in Taiwan to design, fabricate, and test this AiP RFFE module which utilizes a Anokiwave phasor chipset and a 2x4 patch antenna array that gives >18 dBm Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) while steering the radiated beam over ±35° with <1 ppm error vector magnitude (EVM) under 64 QAM modulation. This reference design is analogous to many use cases for 5G telecommunication deployment such as small cells and mmWave base stations where LTCC is a excellent material platform due to high reliability, superior thermal performance, and stable material performance at high frequency over all practical ambient conditions.

Continued advances in the Flexible and Formable Electronics is driving the material suppliers such as DuPont Teijin Films to provide functionality to meet wide ranging demands for applications such as displays, TFT backplanes, energy harvesting and storage, sensors and Human Machine Interfaces.

This talk will give a brief overview of DTF’s PET and PEN product range meeting wide ranging application needs.

Thereby the focus will be on the recent progress made with the development of PEN substrates for extreme processing requirements, formable PETfilms for in-mold electronics, films with ultra clean and smooth surfaces for ultra barrier and high resolution structures and combining UV absorption, weather resistance or fire retardancy whilst also offering more sustainable solutions with the incorporation of recycled materials in the substrates.

DTF has launched many films through collaborations with partners in the flexible electronic industry as our organisation is proving to be uniquely capable of offering customised and affordable polyester substrate solutions.

Printed electronics are increasingly relevant to the large-scale industrialization and commer- cialization of integrated sensors and functionalities. To equip high-value components with printed sensors medium lot sizes, direct printing of functionalities onto a semi-finished or finished component is the most automatable approach to manufacturing. However, the thermal post-treatment of printed layers is often not possible or can only be achieved with compromises using conventional oven processes, either for reasons of energy and thus cost efficiency, com- ponent size, loss of mechanical properties or insufficient thermal load capacity of the compo- nents used.

The use of laser radiation for thermal post-treatment of printed functionalities offers ad- vantages in these application scenarios. Due to the local heat input, sensors printed directly on components can be selectively and quickly post treated. On the one hand, this saves energy in production and thus costs. On the other hand, it enables the automation of the entire sensor production directly on a component or a semi-finished product on a machine tool or production

Further advantages are the significantly shorter processing times of laser processing com- pared to oven processes as well as the complete 3D compatibility of the process.

We will present the possibilities and advantages of combined printing and laser processes for manufacturing embedded sensors. We will show how these technologies can be combined with other manufacturing processes to open up new possibilities for the production of component-connected functionalities.