Wearable and flexible technologies enabled by advanced thin-film manufacture and metrology

智能眼镜等可穿戴技术最近在商业和技术领域引起了极大的兴奋。然而，这些例子使用的是相对常规的技术。当我们能够制造足够灵活和非侵入性的材料和组件，可以整合到我们的衣服等日常用品中时，可穿戴技术的真正突破就会到来。实现这一目标的主要挑战是缺乏可靠性，柔性基板上的(光电)电子设备的性能限制，以及缺乏灵活的电源。许多必要的设备技术都是以某种新兴形式存在的；我们的提议将提供技术创新，使其能够以与可穿戴技术兼容的形式制造。在这个项目中，我们的目标是解决可穿戴技术中的一个关键技术挑战，即通过利用英国在零部件和放大技术方面的以下卓越技术领域来实现可扩展和具有成本效益的制造：1)组装的财团侧重于发明和展示显示器、能量收集和传感所需的柔性基板上的关键可穿戴技术。2)该联盟由建模预测、计量、系统集成和可靠性设计领域的关键研究人员组成，所有这些都是对设备工程的补充。3)重要的是，通过从一开始就集成制造这种灵活技术的Roll-to-Roll(R2R)方面，我们将创造制造技术，使基础科学转化为制造。所有可穿戴设备的沉积过程都面临着类似的挑战，如低材料产量、高浪费(对功能薄膜很重要，因为最大限度地减少浪费大大节省了成本)，以及缺乏现场过程监控。此外，对于我们的目标应用，目前还没有可扩展的高性价比制造技术。卷对卷加工满足了这一关键需求，我们的目标将是使这种可扩展的制造技术能够在柔性基板上进行廉价生产，这是一个在先进功能材料方面开发很少的领域，但具有巨大的潜力。

Wearable technologies such as smart glasses have recently caused much excitement in the business and technology spheres. However, these examples use relatively conventional technologies. The real breakthrough in wearable technologies will come when we can manufacture materials and components that are flexible and non-intrusive enough to be integrated into everyday items, such as our clothes. The main challenges to achieving this are the lack of reliability, performance limitations of (opto)electronics on flexible substrates, and the lack of flexible power sources. Much of the necessary device technology exists in some nascent form; our proposal will provide the technological innovation to allow its manufacture in a form compatible with wearable technology. In this project we aim to solve a key technological challenge in wearable technologies, namely that of scalable and cost-effective manufacturing by taking advantage of the following areas of UK technological excellence in components and scale-up technologies:1) The assembled consortium has an emphasis on inventing and demonstrating the key wearables technologies required on flexible substrates for displays, energy harvesting and sensing. 2) The consortium consists of key researchers in the fields of modeling prediction, metrology, systems integration and design for reliability, all required to complement the device engineering.3) Importantly, by integrating, right from the word go, the aspect of Roll-to-Roll (R2R) scale-up of manufacturing such flexible technologies, we will create the manufacturing know-how to allow fundamental science to translate into manufacturing.The deposition processes for all wearables face similar challenges such as low material yield, high waste (important for functional films where minimizing waste saves costs substantially) and lack of in-situ process monitoring. Additionally, for our targeted applications, there is currently no scalable cost-effective manufacturing technology. Roll-to-roll processing fulfills this crucial need and our aim will be to enable this scalable manufacturing technology for inexpensive production on flexible substrates, an area very much underexplored in terms of advanced functional materials, but one with huge potential.