Organic Pressure-Sensing Surfaces Fabricated by Lamination of Flexible Substrates

This paper presents the design and experimental characterization of large-area active matrixes on foil for pressure-sensing applications. Front-end circuits based on organic thin-film transistors on a flexible substrate are laminated with a foil hosting screen-printed PDVF-TrFE piezo sensors to create the complete flexible sensing systems with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6 \times 10$ </tex-math></inline-formula> sensing elements on a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$16.5~\text {cm} \times 27.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> cm area. After defining the specifications based on the application scenarios, and designing two different front-end matrixes (A and B), the performance of the sensing surface B has been investigated in simulation. Numerical results show a readout speed of 5 kframe/s and 78.6 dB maximum signal-to-noise ratio with impact forces up to 50 kN. Experiments made with a prototype based on front end A confirm that the system can correctly reconstruct the impact profile of forces up to 50 kN obtained in a drop tower setup. Measurements of the front end circuit B show an input equivalent noise of 451 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{V}_{\mathrm {rms}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and a 5% settling time of 13.8 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{s}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, both adequate for the specified applications.

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