Designing solution-processable air-stable liquid crystalline crosslinkable semiconductors

Author(s):  
Iain McCulloch ◽  
Clare Bailey ◽  
Kristijonas Genevicius ◽  
Martin Heeney ◽  
Maxim Shkunov ◽  
...  

Organic electronics technology, in which at least the semiconducting component of the integrated circuit is an organic material, offers the potential for fabrication of electronic products by low-cost printing technologies, such as ink jet, gravure offset lithography and flexography. The products will typically be of lower performance than those using the present state of the art single crystal or polysilicon transistors, but comparable to amorphous silicon. A range of prototypes are under development, including rollable electrophoretic displays, active matrix liquid crystal (LC) displays, flexible organic light emitting diode displays, low frequency radio frequency identification tag and other low performance electronics. Organic semiconductors that offer both electrical performance and stability with respect to storage and operation under ambient conditions are required. This work describes the development of reactive mesogen semiconductors, which form large crosslinked LC domains on polymerization within mesophases. These crosslinked domains offer mechanical stability and are inert to solvent exposure in further processing steps. Reactive mesogens containing conjugated aromatic cores, designed to facilitate charge transport and provide good oxidative stability, were prepared and their liquid crystalline properties evaluated. The organization and alignment of the mesogens, both before and after crosslinking, were probed by grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering of thin films. Both time-of-flight and field effect transistor devices were prepared and their electrical characterization reported.

Author(s):  
Han Tao ◽  
Shui Yongan

This chapter overviews a complementary technology to the integrated circuit based radio frequency identification (RFID)---- Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) based RFID. The fundamental principle and applications of SAW RFID are presented. In order to guarantee the encoding capacity and reliable reading range, the design criteria in coding scheme, tag design and a time domain interrogated reader design are discussed in detail. As an example, a low-cost SAW RFID system applied in poultry farming management is introduced.


2001 ◽  
Vol 708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janos Veres ◽  
Simon Ogier ◽  
Stephen Leeming ◽  
Beverley Brown ◽  
Domenico Cupertino

ABSTRACTThe rapidly expanding field of organic semiconductors for display and low-cost electronic applications requires materials, which not only have high mobility but also benefit from solution processability and environmental stability. In this paper we present a new class of solution coatable organic materials with excellent stability to air and light. Spin-coated FET devices operate at ambient conditions without encapsulation and show p-type field-effect mobilities of 2 x 10-3 cm2V-1s-1 and on/off ratios greater than 104. Thin films can be deposited from common organic solvents onto a variety of substrates. These films are mechanically robust and can withstand temperatures in excess of 100 °C without significant changes in electrical performance. FET switching and transient characteristics at higher frequencies are also discussed. These types of materials should find applications in many areas of flexible electronics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peisheng Liu ◽  
Jinlan Wang ◽  
Liangyu Tong ◽  
Yujuan Tao

Fast development of wafer level packaging (WLP) in recent years is mainly owing to the advances in integrated circuit fabrication process and the market demands for devices with high electrical performance, small form factor, low cost etc. This paper reviews the advances of WLP technology in recent years. An overall introduction to WLP is presented in the first part. The fabrication processes of WLP and redistribution technology are introduced in the second part. Reliability problems of WLPs, such as the strength of solder joints and reliability problems concerning fan-out WLPs are introduced in the third part. Typical applications of WLP technologies are discussed in the last part, which include the application of fan-out WLP, 3D packaging integrating with WLP technologies and its application in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hangyu Zhu ◽  
Shaolei Wang ◽  
Menghu Zhang ◽  
Tingyu Li ◽  
Gaohua Hu ◽  
...  

AbstractLiquid metal represents a highly conductive and inherently deformable conductor for the development of stretchable electronics. The widespread implementations of liquid metal towards functional sensors and circuits are currently hindered by the lack of a facile and scalable patterning approach. In this study, we report a fully solution-based process to generate patterned features of the liquid metal conductor. The entire process is carried out under ambient conditions and is generally compatible with various elastomeric substrates. The as-prepared liquid metal feature exhibits high resolution (100 μm), excellent electrical conductivity (4.15 × 104S cm−1), ultrahigh stretchability (1000% tensile strain), and mechanical durability. The practical suitability is demonstrated by the heterogeneous integration of light-emitting diode (LED) chips with liquid metal interconnects for a stretchable and wearable LED array. The solution-based technique reported here is the enabler for the facile patterning of liquid metal features at low cost, which may find a broad range of applications in emerging fields of epidermal sensors, wearable heaters, advanced prosthetics, and soft robotics.


Author(s):  
José Capmany ◽  
Daniel Pérez

Programmable Integrated Photonics (PIP) is a new paradigm that aims at designing common integrated optical hardware configurations, which by suitable programming can implement a variety of functionalities that, in turn, can be exploited as basic operations in many application fields. Programmability enables by means of external control signals both chip reconfiguration for multifunction operation as well as chip stabilization against non-ideal operation due to fluctuations in environmental conditions and fabrication errors. Programming also allows activating parts of the chip, which are not essential for the implementation of a given functionality but can be of help in reducing noise levels through the diversion of undesired reflections. After some years where the Application Specific Photonic Integrated Circuit (ASPIC) paradigm has completely dominated the field of integrated optics, there is an increasing interest in PIP justified by the surge of a number of emerging applications that are and will be calling for true flexibility, reconfigurability as well as low-cost, compact and low-power consuming devices. This book aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to this emergent field covering aspects that range from the basic aspects of technologies and building photonic component blocks to the design alternatives and principles of complex programmable photonics circuits, their limiting factors, techniques for characterization and performance monitoring/control and their salient applications both in the classical as well as in the quantum information fields. The book concentrates and focuses mainly on the distinctive features of programmable photonics as compared to more traditional ASPIC approaches.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Zomorrodi ◽  
N.C. Karmakar

The electromagnetic (EM) imaging technique at mm-band 60 GHz is proposed for data encoding purpose in the chipless Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. The fully printable chipless RFID tag comprises tiny conductive EM polarizers to create high cross-polar radar cross-section. Synthetic aperture radar approach is applied for formation of the tag's EM-image and revealing the tag's content. The achieved high data encoding capacity of 2 bits/cm2in this technique based on a fully printable tag is very convincing for many applications. The system immunity to multipath interference, bending effect, and printing inaccuracy suggests huge potentials for low-cost item tagging. Tags are also readable through a tick paper envelop; hence secure identification is provided by the proposed technique.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 155014772110248
Author(s):  
Miaoyu Li ◽  
Zhuohan Jiang ◽  
Yutong Liu ◽  
Shuheng Chen ◽  
Marcin Wozniak ◽  
...  

Physical health diseases caused by wrong sitting postures are becoming increasingly serious and widespread, especially for sedentary students and workers. Existing video-based approaches and sensor-based approaches can achieve high accuracy, while they have limitations like breaching privacy and relying on specific sensor devices. In this work, we propose Sitsen, a non-contact wireless-based sitting posture recognition system, just using radio frequency signals alone, which neither compromises the privacy nor requires using various specific sensors. We demonstrate that Sitsen can successfully recognize five habitual sitting postures with just one lightweight and low-cost radio frequency identification tag. The intuition is that different postures induce different phase variations. Due to the received phase readings are corrupted by the environmental noise and hardware imperfection, we employ series of signal processing schemes to obtain clean phase readings. Using the sliding window approach to extract effective features of the measured phase sequences and employing an appropriate machine learning algorithm, Sitsen can achieve robust and high performance. Extensive experiments are conducted in an office with 10 volunteers. The result shows that our system can recognize different sitting postures with an average accuracy of 97.02%.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1697
Author(s):  
Xicong Li ◽  
Zabih Ghassemlooy ◽  
Stanislav Zvánovec ◽  
Paul Anthony Haigh

With advances in solid-state lighting, visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance existing light-emitting diode (LED)-based lighting infrastructure by adding data communication capabilities to the illumination functionality. The last decade has witnessed the evolution of the VLC concept through global standardisation and product launches. Deploying VLC systems typically requires replacing existing light sources with new luminaires that are equipped with data communication functionality. To save the investment, it is clearly desirable to make the most of the existing illumination systems. This paper investigates the feasibility of adding data communication functionality to the existing lighting infrastructure. We do this by designing an experimental system in an indoor environment based on an off-the-shelf LED panel typically used in office environments, with the dimensions of 60 × 60 cm2. With minor modifications, the VLC function is implemented, and all of the modules of the LED panel are fully reused. A data rate of 40 Mb/s is supported at a distance of up to 2 m while using the multi-band carrierless amplitude and phase (CAP) modulation. Two main limiting factors for achieving higher data rates are observed. The first factor is the limited bandwidth of the LED string inside the panel. The second is the flicker due to the residual ripple of the bias current that is generated by the panel’s driver. Flicker is introduced by the low-cost driver, which provides bias currents that fluctuate in the low frequency range (less than several kilohertz). This significantly reduces the transmitter’s modulation depth. Concurrently, the driver can also introduce an effect that is similar to baseline wander at the receiver if the flicker is not completely filtered out. We also proposed a solution based on digital signal processing (DSP) to mitigate the flicker issue at the receiver side and its effectiveness has been confirmed.


Polymers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 1184
Author(s):  
Maria Cantarella ◽  
Giuliana Impellizzeri ◽  
Alessandro Di Mauro ◽  
Vittorio Privitera ◽  
Sabrina Carola Carroccio

The immobilization of inorganic nanomaterials on polymeric substrates has been drawing a lot of attention in recent years owing to the extraordinary properties of the as-obtained materials. The hybrid materials, indeed, combine the benefits of the plastic matter such as flexibility, low-cost, mechanical stability and high durability, with them deriving from their inorganic counterparts. In particular, if the inorganic fillers are nanostructured photocatalysts, the originated hybrid systems will be able to utilize the energy delivered by light, catalysing chemical reactions in a sustainable pathway. Most importantly, since the nanofillers can be ad-hoc anchored to the macromolecular structure, their release in the environment will be prevented, thus overcoming one of the main restrictions that impedes their applications on a large scale. In this review, several typologies of hybrid photocatalytic nanomaterials, obtained by using both organic and inorganic semiconductors and realized with different synthetic protocols, were reported and discussed. In the first part of the manuscript, nanocomposites realized by simply blending the TiO2 or ZnO nanomaterials in thermoplastic polymeric matrices are illustrated. Subsequently, the atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique is presented as an excellent method to formulate polymeric nanocomposites. Successively, some examples of polyporphyrins hybrid systems containing graphene, acting as photocatalysts under visible light irradiation, are discussed. Lastly, photocatalytic polymeric nanosponges, with extraordinary adsorption properties, are shown. All the described materials were deeply characterized and their photocatalytic abilities were evaluated by the degradation of several organic water pollutants such as dyes, phenol, pesticides, drugs, and personal care products. The antibacterial performance was also evaluated for selected systems. The relevance of the obtained results is widely overviewed, opening the route for the application of such multifunctional photocatalytic hybrid materials in wastewater remediation.


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