Flexible Electronics is a fast growing area, allowing technology integration combining form-factor (bendable, stretchable) and cost benefits compared with the greater and more mature functionality of conventional electronics. There are many printed components now available and we are moving into the era of “integrated smart systems” with these, but currently the “intelligent” part uses conventional electronic components (microcontrollers/microprocessors and Bluetooth chips). This is called “hybrid integration” or “flexible hybrid electronics”.
This project is addressing, amongst others, the challenges of building a flexible MCU. There are challenges in the technology – getting to lower power, higher gate density and higher performance, to getting the dense connections needed to reliably assemble flexible chips to flexible substrates.
We are not challenging the high performance end of computing. However, flexible printed electronics has very low costs, low setup costs (orders of magnitude less than a custom silicon design, very short setup times from design to product (days instead of months) and the technology – both the electronics themselves and the production processes are much more environmentally friendly.
This creates a huge new market for products with modest computing and complexity needs. Obvious markets are FCMG – Fast Moving Consumer Goods and healthcare wearables. There are many markets, such as in anti-counterfeiting, product traceability, and the idea-development-product costs are now within the range of many SMEs.