High Processing Powered Flexible Electronics for Next Gen Wearables
 

High Processing Powered Flexible Electronics for Next Gen Wearables
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A team headed by researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison, has come up with a way of embedding fast transistors and integrating wireless tech**logy into highly flexible plastic sheets. The tech**logy should apparently be easy to introduce and result in cheap manufacturing costs, allowing it potentially be used in a variety of medical and health related devices.

The transistors operate at 38 GHz and further testing and refinement can get that up even higher, allowing for powerful computing capabilities right inside the flexible film. The material could integrate body sensors and measure different parameters while conforming to the natural shape of the body and being comfortable to wear.

Here are some details about the production process according to UW-Madison:

Using low-temperature processes, Ma, Seo and their colleagues patterned the circuitry on their flexible transistor — single-crystalline silicon ultimately placed on a polyethylene terephthalate (more commonly k**wn as PET) substrate — drawing on a simple, low-cost process called na**imprint lithography.

In a method called selective doping, researchers introduce impurities into materials in precise locations to enhance their properties — in this case, electrical conductivity. But sometimes the dopant merges into areas of the material it shouldn’t, causing what is k**wn as the short channel effect. However, the UW–Madison researchers took an unconventional approach: They blanketed their single crystalline silicon with a dopant, rather than selectively doping it.

Then, they added a light-sensitive material, or photoresist layer, and used a technique called electron-beam lithography — which uses a focused beam of electrons to create shapes as narrow as 10 na**meters wide — on the photoresist to create a reusable mold of the na**scale patterns they desired. They applied the mold to an ultrathin, very flexible silicon membrane to create a photoresist pattern. Then they finished with a dry-etching process — essentially, a na**scale knife — that cut precise, na**meter-scale trenches in the silicon following the patterns in the mold, and added wide gates, which function as switches, atop the trenches.

Study in Scientific Reports: Fast Flexible Transistors with a Na**trench Structure…

Via:*University of Wisconsin—Madison…

(hat tip: Engadget))

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