The remarkable technological advancements of our era, driven by significant enhancements in traditional semiconductor materials, have rendered electronic devices essential components of our daily lives. Despite the increasing energy efficiency of these devices during their operational phase, there exists a notable disparity between the energy consumed during their manufacturing process and their lifetime energy consumption.
Many mechanical deformations, such as buckling, wrinkling, collapsing, and delamination, are usually considered as threats to mechanical integrity and are avoided or reduced in the traditional design of materials and structures. Our work goes against these conventions by tailoring such mechanical instabilities to create strain-engineered functional morphologies.
Fueled by technological advances in both material science and manufacturing techniques, Flexible and Large-Area Electronics (FLAE) has witnessed a tremendous progression in recent years. Thanks to the limited temperature budget of FLAE fabrication processes, thin-film electronics can be developed today on a vast variety of mechanically flexible and biodegradable substrates or even printed directly on product packages. Despite this rapid evolution, the performance of FLAE Thin-Film Transistors (TFTs) is still several orders of magnitudes lower than mainstream Silicon CMOS transistors in terms of speed, noise, energy efficiency, and integration density.
The development of medical devices that comply with the soft mechanics of biological systems at different length and complexity levels is highly desirable. With the emergence of conducting polymers exciting directions opened in bioelectronics research, bridging the gap between traditional electronics and biology. With the goal of fully integrated devices, organic bioelectronic technologies have been heavily explored the past decade resulting in novel materials/device configurations. Multiplexing capability, ability to adopt to complex performance requirements in biological fluids, sensitivity, stability, literal flexibility, and compatibility with large-area processes are only some of the merits of this technology for biomedical applications. This talk will summarize our recent progress on organic bioelectronic sensors for applications ranging from metabolite sensing to infection diagnostics combining materials development and processing with new biofunctionalization strategies aiming to improve the sensitivity and conformability of the sensors.
The growing interest in indoor photovoltaics (IPVs) is motivated by the need to find a sustainable solution to power the rapidly growing number of sensors within the Internet of Things ecosystem. Halide perovskites harvest indoor light very efficiently with record power conversion efficiency values of the corresponding IPVs. However, perovskite-based absorbers contain lead cation, which introduces toxicity hazards especially relevant in indoor scenarios. Hence, exploring less toxic yet stable ambient light harvesters is an urgent and highly challenging goal.
Large-area electronic components can favorably be combined with ultrathin highly-integrated silicon chips by jointly integrating and interconnecting them on a flexible substrate carrier. The resulting Hybrid System-in-Foil (HySiF), thus, allows for merging the best of two worlds, resulting in a highly complex and high performance flexible electronic system. This article addresses the concept with advantages and challenges of HySiFs in terms of their electronic and mechanical aspects. Also addressed are three generic application cases along with manufacturing aspects.
Conventional electronics today form on the planar surfaces of brittle wafer substrates and are not compatible with 3D deformable surfaces. As a result, stretchable electronic devices have been developed for continuous health monitoring. Practical applications of the next-generation stretchable electronics hinge on the integration of stretchable sustained power supplies with highly sensitive on-skin sensors and wireless transmission modules.
RF and microwave technologies are the ‘interconnect’ of standard wireless electronics. To enable a truly pervasive and practical next-generation of flexible, printed, and textile-based systems, a transition to RF-enabled systems is required. The full-stack of designing wireless systems using large-area electronics will be introduced, from formulating novel sensing composites, through adopting biodegradable and organic conductive materials, to co-designing electronic materials with RF systems. The highlight is that printed and flexible electronics can outperform their conventional counterparts in certain applications. The outstanding challenges in reliability, sustainability, and compatibility with standard electronic devices will be qualitatively introduced based on life cycle assessments (LCAs) and systematic reliability testing.
In an increasingly health-aware population and a move towards remote diagnostics, remote healthcare monitoring and cloud-based med-tech, we tap on the ubiquitous and unlimited reservoir of on-skin biomarkers, including sweat metabolites, in developing a wearable, non-invasive, continuous and real-time sensor – a printed, multiplexed biosensor. Such a device can be colorimetric or electrochemical in its sensing mechanism. Our integrated devices are designed and developed with scalability and translation in mind – ensuring printability (for scalable manufacturing), ease of fabrication routes, and solid-state and miniaturised prototype.[1-8]
