Developing Robust, high-resolution, high-performance and low-cost printing technologies for making flexible and stretchable electronics and devices

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Electronics or devices, which are flexible, wearable, rollable and/or foldable, will bring us completely different user experience and even change the way of our life. Making flexible and stretchable electronics and devices has become an important direction of advanced manufacturing. Recent advances in materials and manufacturing processes have enabled many new applications of flexible electronics/devices, for example, electronic paper, curved screens, foldable or rollable displays, flexible solar cells, tunable lens, artificial muscles, skin sensors and wearable biomedical devices for health monitoring. The market demand for flexible, printed, and organic electronics dramatically increases. Currently the global market is over $1B, and will grow up to $45B by 2016. Recently material or inkjet printing has emerged as a very promising technique for mass production of large-area flexible and stretchable electronics at relatively low cost. Inkjet printing is a versatile technique that places conductive inorganic or organic materials in a direct-writing manner to designated locations on elastomeric substrates. In spite of its many advantages, current inkjet printing technology still faces a number of technical challenges such as low conductivity of printed metallic circuits, weak adhesion between conductive materials and the substrate, low resolution compared to the conventional IC processes, and limited choices of conductive materials and substrate materials. In this project, we will develop new inkjet printing technologies that can overcome the abovementioned technical challenges and significantly improve performance of the printed electronics/devices. For example, the printed copper circuits by our technologies can achieve a breakthrough high conductivity up to 75% of bulk copper. Potentially our technologies can also achieve a breakthrough high resolution that allows for printing high-density integrated circuits. With many applications proposed to develop, this project will show significant benefit to Canada's economy and provide excellent training opportunities to Canada's young engineers.