Contact persons: Prof. David Atienza (ESL), Danick Briand (SAMLAB)
Motivation
Flexible electronics have emerged as a very interesting technology for applications such as flexible displays, solar cells, radio frequency identification tags, sensors and devices that have not been dreamt of yet. Furthermore large-scale fabrication of these circuits will lead to high-volume and very low-cost production. Additive printing techniques such as ink-jet, gravure, micro-contact, in combination with dispensing and lamination processes, enable the fabrication of passive and active components.
The purpose of this project is to develop a a flexible wearable wireless sensing platform at low-cost. The first prototype uses commercial silicon sensors transferred onto a flexible plastic substrate used as PCB. Investigation is on-going in order to have both fully printed interconnects with low-cost, low-complexity and low temperature assembly processes for the silicon chips. The flexible sensor board will communicate with a motherboard that will make the data acquisition, the post-processing, and storage of the signals in real-time, tasks being handled by the ESL Laboratory at EPFL.
Further research work is foreseen to replace the commercial silicon devices by sensors fabricated at the foil level.
