Consumer demand for stretchable and flexible electronic devices is a growth area within the electronics industry. Fibreglass-based printed circuit boards are evolving into flexible and stretchable wearable-electronic systems. This technology promises to expand the design space for engineers and will allow us to create unique, multifunctional, multidomain structures and highly integrated devices.
Our research into flexible, and stretchable electronics systems involves a new process for encapsulating integrated circuits within a soft, elastomeric material, and using eutectic liquid metal alloy for interconnect. This process results in systems which exhibit mechanical compliance and which hold great potential for applications including wearable wireless health monitors, spatiotemporal cardiac measurements, environmental monitoring, soft robots, and smart lenses. We used our LPKF ProtoLaser U3 to develop a rapid and reliable way of making soft-lithography moulds for casting polymeric materials (e.g. PDMS, Ecoflex). Our poster on this subject was presented at the 2016 MicroTech conference in Heriot-Watt University.
Using our soft-lithography process, we can integrate sensors into soft-systems. Appropriate design of the microfluidic channel yields sensors for strain, curvature, or pressure. Our process is rapid and customisable, and we have designed the workflow for scale-up and manufacture. The resultant soft-sensing systems hold potential in many application areas, and our research focus is on the system-level integration of functional soft-electronics.
This November in Tampa, Florida, Lijun Teng (PhD Candidate) presented her work on soft packaging for the development of integrated soft systems at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE 2017).
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