Enabling Electronics With Physically Flexible ICs and Hybrid Manufacturing

Printed and flexible electronic components have been used and proposed in a wide range of markets, including biomedical, environmental, computers, energy, and communication. Fully printed and flexible electronic systems promise great advantages in ease of manufacture, weight, durability, and physical conformity, but such systems have failed to achieve widespread adoption. Printed technology still seeks solutions in the areas of complex logic, analog circuitry, power usage, and light emission. First, the benefits and challenges of taking hybrid manufacturing approaches that combine printed components with either traditional integrated circuits or recently fabricated complex flexible devices are discussed. Second, a recently realized set of physically flexible integrated circuits poised to accelerate the development of flexible sensor systems is presented, enabling the combination of low cost and large format printed systems with high performance and low-power silicon-based semiconductors. The chip set addresses the three requirements of flexible sensor systems, namely, sensor readout, signal processing, and communications with three chips-an analog-to-digital converter, a microcontroller, and an RF communicator. This technology may revolutionize such things as smart, wearable consumer devices, flexible and conformal industrial applications, and smart structures for military, automotive, and aerospace.