AUTOFLEX - Automated Integration of Flexible Electronics

建立在塑料和其他廉价基板（纸/卡）上的印刷电子产品可以使新产品进入大批量市场，如消费品包装和防伪标签。印刷电子市场目前估计为15亿英镑，到2021年增长到300亿英镑，到2027年增长到2000亿英镑（IDTechEx）。PCB上的传统电子器件是刚性的，难以在产品内分布，并且过度设计，导致这些应用的成本很高。柔性（印刷）电子产品可以克服这些限制，并使许多新的封装产品成为可能。需要高度自动化的制造工艺来满足这些应用的极高容量，并集成薄膜组件，以提供所需的电源，显示/照明，逻辑和其他印刷电路。现有的集成解决方案，如拾取和放置（已广泛用于电子产品），不能经济有效地扩展到消费包装和安全产品所需的非常高的数量（最终> 1万亿单位/年）。本计画将发展以雷射加工及低温导电贴附为基础之自动化制程及系统设计。该项目将开放这些高价值的应用程序，并为已经可寻址的应用程序提供更低的成本和更好的外形尺寸。

Printed electronics built on plastic and other cheap substrates (paper/card) can enable new products in high volume markets such as consumer packaging and anti-counterfeit labels. The printed electronics market is estimated to be £1.5B today, growing to £30B by 2021 and £200B by 2027 (IDTechEx). Conventional electronics on PCBs is rigid, difficult to distribute within products and over-engineered, resulting in high cost for these applications. Flexible (printed) electronics can overcome these constraints and enable many new ultrathin form-factor products. Highly-automated manufacturing processes are required to meet the extremely high-volumes of these applications and integrate the thin-film components which will provide the required power, display/lighting, logic and other printed circuitry. Existing integration solutions such as pick-and-place (already widely used in electronics) do not cost-effectively scale to the very-high volumes required by consumer packaging and security products (ultimately >1trn units pa). This project will develop the automated manufacturing processes and system design based on laser-processing and low-temperature conductive attach. The project will open-up these high-value applications, in addition to providing lower-cost and improved form-factor for already addressable applications.