Printed Electronics: A Disruptive Manufacturing Platform and an Enabler of Functional Surfaces

The conventional semiconductor and electronics assembly industry has relied on ever increasing densities of integration from high capital cost manufacturing and disparate supply chains and assembly processes for integrating discreet, rigid components into products. Additive printed electronics is emerging as a new manufacturing platform for low capital cost and low carbon footprint manufacturing of large area, low density devices and integrated systems. The additive printing processes are less wasteful, allow for less expensive designs changes and do not rely on lower throughput, isolated and high energy batch processes such as vacuum deposition, subtractive lithography, etching and stripping processes. Printing and coating of functional, solution-borne molecular and nanoscale semiconductor, dielectric, metallic and ionic materials can be conducted in integrated processes to produce large area devices on thin and flexible, low temperature substrates. This has lead to new functional surface-based device concepts that can integrate sensing, logic, and energy storage as well as hybrid thinned CMOS devices. These printed flexible components and functional surfaces can enable new products such as flexible wearable electronics, health care devices and internet of things sensor and display nodes. This talk will give an introduction to these manufacturing concepts and applications as well as describe new initiatives for printed electronics, energy devices and academic/industrial collaboration at the University of Washington.