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Recent Development in Flexible Electronics

Chin-Chin Tsai
R& D Deputy Director of Flexible Electronics Technology Division,
Electronics and Optoelectronics Research Laboratories
Industrial Technology Research Institute
Hsin-Chu, Taiwan/Republic of China

Abstract and actuators.

Following the success of the semiconductor and flat
panel displays, Flexible Electronics is expected to
become the next wave industry. The characteristic of
Flexible Electronics is not only reduced production cost
and they have lightweight, thinner, non-breakable and
new forms to create many new applications. It can be
leveraging Taiwan’s fast integration capability to create
new products and applications. The target industries are
flexible AMOLED displays and electronic papers,
flexible lighting modules with LED, flexible
photovoltaics, flexible pressure and touch sensors, and
flexible speakers, and so on. In addition, there are
developments of related materials, processes, facilities
and scenario prototype products. Taiwan's industry had
built an electronics paper supply chains, will drive rapid
development of eReader market. The real color of the
electronic paper and soft products will appear soon in the
market. High differentiation of flexible sensors, speakers
and lighting sheets are developing markets.
Introduction
The Europe countries reviewed the competitiveness
of semiconductor and flat-panel display industrials, and
found only a few companies is important player. They
decided to develop Organic Electronics as a future
industry because they have the most powerful of the
organic chemistry and materials industries. And then,
Organic Electronics was combined with printing
technology to reduce the production cost. It was called
Printed Electronics. As the organic materials and printing
technology is very suited manufacturing on the flexible
substrates, specially, high throughput roll-to-roll
processes. The characteristic of Flexible Electronics is
not only use organic materials, printing processes and
flexible substrates to reduce production cost and they
have lightweight, thinner, non-breakable and new forms
to create many new applications. The applications of
Flexible Electronics can be divided into four areas,
namely, electronic circuits and memory, displays and
electronic papers, solar cells and batteries, and sensors
Technology Challenge
Although the Flexible Electronics research and
development over many years. Some products
successfully entered the market but there are still many
technical challenges. Such as
(1) Flexible substrate handling and alignment: the
dimensional control of plastic substrate is very difficulty
due to temperature, humidity and tension variation,
special, roll-to-roll operation.
(2) Organic materials film formation quality: the
film morphology is not easy to control due to
solvent-effect, the long-chain molecular configuration,
and processes conditions.
(3) Flexible conductor conductivity and work
function: the operation flexible and conductivity is the
trade-off parameters, and work function always needs to
modify.
(4) Printing quality: the printing qualities (thickness,
register, trace and function) are not easy to control due
liquid off-set or jetting operations, special, multilayer or
large-area film printing.
(5) Flexible operation: the practice flexible
operations (bending, foldable or rollable) is not east to
guarantee due to stress of multilayer structure. And most
important, the user operation behavior is not predictable.
(6) Infancy quality and price: for an exist product,
the benchmark is difficulty reached.
Status of Technology and Industrial
The research and development in Taiwan is focused
on big markets, nearly markets, and differentiation
markets. The sector of big markets includes active-matrix
organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) flexible display,
LED-based flexible lighting module and flexible
photovoltaics (organic solar cell, dye-sensitized solar cell
and CIGS solar cell). The sector of close to markets
includes printed RFID antenna, flexible backplane with
electrophoretic display (EPD), and cholesteric liquid
crystal (Ch-LC) flexible e-paper, and R2R touch sensor.

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The sector of close to markets includes flexible speaker
usage electret membrane and flexible pressure sensor. In
addition, there are developments of related materials,
processes, equipments and scenario prototype products.
Development strategy of Flexible Electronics is
depended on global technology progresses and market
forecasts. For example, ITRI has been developing
organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) technology. It was
planned to apply into the printed logic circuit at the
original target. But its performance is not good due to
low mobility materials, poor printing technology and bad
device uniformity. So it is changed to develop of OTFT
array, and apply into flexible display backplane. Some
enabling creative technologies will be introduced as
follows:
Electronics Paper
Currently the most successful technology and
industry is electronics papers, the main applications are
eReaders, electronics shelf labels, smart cards,
electronics posters, and so on. The biggest business is
eReaders, the almost is supplied from Taiwan's
manufacturers. E-ink Holdings invested in E-inks and
AUO invested Sipix to get electrophoretic display media
(EPD), combining with their strong manufacturing
abilities to supply EPD modules. Detla Electronics and
Brdigestone cooperate to develop a colorful electronics
papers (QRLPD) to replace black/white EPD media.
Many colorful technologies are developed Industrial and
ITRI. Sollink (Qualcomm and Foxlink joint venture)
develops IMOD colorful technology and ITRI develops
cholesterol liquid crystal and electrowetting technologies.ʳ
Currently the eReader is not really flexible because it use
a glass backplane. E-Ink Holdings and ITRI demonstrate
the flexible backplane and flexible papers. The backplane
technology of E-Ink Holdings is used silicon transistors
on the polyimide substrate. The technology of ITRI
includes organic semiconductor and printing process,
substrate is PET films which only can be processing at
low temperature. ITRI also develops a passive
technology of cholesterol liquid crystal which can be
manufacturing using a fully roll-to-roll process.
Flexible Sensor
ITRI develops a flexible fully-printing pressure
sensor and receives runners-up of Wall Street Journal
Technology Innovation Award in this year. This flexible
sensor is a piezoresistive-type that the resistance is linear
with pressure. The key technology of ITRI is developing
a special piezoresistive material and robust device
structure, allowing flexible sensor to be produced using
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roll-to-roll screen printer. Characteristic of flexible sensor
is high linear relationship between pressure and
conductance. It does not need a complicate firmware and
system, so production cost is very low. In addition, this
sensor could easily make a large-area sensor array. A
cheap, flexible and large-area sensor array has many
applications, such as, user-interface, weight scales, and
so on. ITRI develops and demonstrates many
applications, includes the scalar of luggage, musical
instrument, pressure bed, light controller, racing chair
and touch bottom of portable electronics. This
technology has licensed to UCC, it is building a mass
production plant.
Flexible Speaker
ITRI develops a large-area flexible speaker and
receives winner of Wall Street Journal Technology
˧ˠ
Innovation Award at 2009. FleXpeaker is made by
electret film, so that the driving voltage is lower than
electrostatic speaker. The key technology of ITRI is
developing a special electret material and device
˧ˠ
structure, allowing FleXpeaker to be produced using
partially roll-to-roll processes.ʳ Characteristics of
˧ˠ
FleXpeaker are lightweight, thinner, flexible, low
power consumption and can be used any shape. In
addition, its' audio performance is excellent in the middle
and high frequencies.ʳ A cheap, flexible and large-area
speaker can be replaced in almost all the traditional
speaker. Special, large-area is a interesting application.
ITRI demonstrates a 0.5mW˜2.5mH speaker sheet, it
can be used as part of decorating. Taiwan Electrets
Electronics is a spin-off company from ITRI. It has
already started to sale super-thin speakers.
Conclusion
Taiwan's industry built an electronics paper supply
chain, will drive rapid development of eReader market.
The real color of the e-paper and soft products will
appear soon in the market. High differentiation of
flexible sensors, speakers and lighting sheets are
developing markets. Taiwan has continued to strengthen
research and development to promote industrial
development, to achieve missions.