Leuven.Inc Visionary seminar: Flexible Electronics: technologies and applications

Organised by Leuven.Inc in cooperation with imec

Mobile phones, smart phones, mp3 players … they become ever smaller, with ever smaller screens and keyboards. What we really need is an interface that is lightweight, so that we can carry it around, but that is large enough to match our senses and fingers. For example a pliable or rollable interface.

Thin-film electronic devices on flexible plastic foil are a solution for this. These transistors are the building blocks for flexible plastic displays and computing devices. These can be used for a wide range of applications, think of rollable displays for tablet computers or phones, electronics printed on toys, intelligent food packaging, or paper with integrated electronics.

However, the performance of the transistors that we can process on foil still needs to be improved. And techniques need to be developed to integrate the transistors into increasingly complex circuitry.

The active materials for the plastic electronics are organic molecules and oxide semiconductors. Wherever possible, low-cost patterning techniques need to be used, to make sure this technology is commercially viable.

Practical aspects

Date: Tuesday December 6th, 2011
Location: imec, Auditorium, Kapeldreef 75, 3001 Leuven (Heverlee)

Programme 

The interventions will be held in English 

Participation fee

135 euro (excl. VAT): members of Leuven.Inc - 175 euro (excl. VAT): all others Special fee available for Master and PhD students affiliated to and billable by K.U.Leuven or other universities.  Please do contact us by e-mail.
	Participation in our activities at -50% discount via KMO-portefeuille Pijler OPLEIDING: Leuven.Inc Approval number DV.O106761 More info: www.kmo-portefeuille.be

Registration

Registrations before Tuesday November 29th, 2011, preferably via the online registration form (use the 'Register' button) or by email to admin@leuveninc.com (including all contact and invoice details).

After registration you will receive a confirmation and route description. The registration fee is payable after receipt of invoice. Cancellation after subscription is not possible. However, replacement by a colleague is allowed.*

* As an (Associate) Company Member you can be replaced by a colleague. As an individual Member you can only be replaced by another Individual Member. When this is not possible, Leuven.Inc will charge an extra fee for the replacement by a non-member.

Abstracts 

Materials Systems for Large Area Electronics - Klemens Mathauer, BASF Basel, CH
Organic semiconductors are based on p-conjugated molecular systems whose interaction is the prerequisite for charge transport from one molecule to the other. Strong molecular interaction favors better charge transport but deteriorates the solubility and thus processability of such materials. Intelligent chemical design is needed to find the best material that can be processed from solution, shows sufficient molecular interaction and forms a homogeneous film.
Electronic devices not only consist of semiconductors but also insulators, conducting materials and other complementary materials. Thus, the development of a complete material system around the new semiconducting materials is necessary. Printing and coating of multilayer structures is another challenge for the material and ink development.

Display technologies and applications; towards ubiquitous rollable displays - Edzer Huitema, CTO Polymer Vision BV, Eindhoven
Due to the increasing pressure on screen size and device weight in the mobile industry, R&D into a new wave of flat panel displays was started. The key attributes of these displays are low weight, mechanical flexibility and low power consumption. The ultimate goal is to create a Tablet in a Mobile phone form factor by use of a rollable, foldable or collapsible display, although a number of new and emerging applications are also enabled by this new class of displays. The status and outlook of this new and exiting field will be presented together with the pioneering role of Polymer Vision in this field.

Circuit applications now and in the future and their mass markets. Possibilities of the plastic microprocessor in combination with displays on foil and smart tags - Paul Heremans/Jan Genoe, imec
The number of transistors on flexible foil that can be integrated in a reliable way in a circuit has increased year after year. Circuits of 400 transistors enabled the cheap and disposable inductive identification tags on foil at 13.56 MHz (2008). Circuits of 1200 transistors enabled adding additional functionality to these identification tags, such as e.g. anti-collision protocols, Manchester encoding, sensor read-out, ... (2009). Nowadays (2011), circuits of a complexity beyond 4000 transistors on foils are feasible and this enables the realization of a flexible 8-bit plastic microprocessor on foil. This microprocessor offers a roadmap to a quasi unlimited number of new applications, especially when connected with sensors on foil, flexible and rollable displays and all kinds of actuators. I will screen a few of these applications during this presentation.