What is it about?
The paper discusses techniques that allow printing of high-quality nanoscale electronics layers using inorganic nanostructures on flexible substrates, and their further processing to obtain devices such as sensors, energy harvesters, and transistors and circuits for electronic skin (e-skin) applications. Specifically, contact printing, transfer printing and direct roll printing are discussed along with working mechanisms and the influence of print dynamics. For the sake of completeness, the paper also presents a few examples of organic semiconductor-based devices. E-skin presents a good case for 3D integration of flexible electronics and therefore the use of high-resolution printing to connect various devices on a substrate or 3D stack is also discussed. Finally, major challenges hindering the scalability of printing methods, and their commercial uptake are discussed along with potential solutions. Such a multifunctional 3D e-skin systems could offer interesting new opportunities in application areas such as connected wearables, mobile health, industry 4.0, food packaging, internet of things and human–machine interfaces etc.
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Why is it important?
Recently, good efforts have been made to address the performance-related requirement of e-skin, by using new innovative printing technologies for the fabrication of transistors and integrated circuits (ICs) based on high mobility materials. As an example, nano- to chip-scale inorganic structures have been printed on flexible and degradable substrates using a combination of novel printing strategies, including transfer printing and its variants, contact printing, etc. Such advances are opening new opportunities for resource-efficient, high throughput manufacturing of high-performance flexible electronics. Although the efficacy of these printing methods has been demonstrated at lab-scale by fabricating various devices, they are still at their nascent stages of development. Nonetheless, these new methods hold good promise for high-performance printed electronics and, therefore, this review paper presents a timely discussion. The presented comprehensive review of these novel printing technologies and thoroughly discussed main challenges to scale up these printing technologies by tailoring them to be compatible with roll printing, will help scientists and engineers to develop a multifunctional 3D e-skin system for numerous existing and emerging applications such as connected wearables, mobile health, industry 4.0 etc.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure as it has co-authors with whom I have had long standing collaborations during my four years’ stay at the University of Glasgow while working on the Hetero-Print project. During the project work, we have developed novel home-made printing systems to perform contact printing, transfer printing, and direct roll printing in a semi-automated manner. These printers have the capability to integrate nano to chip scale inorganic structures over substrate with novel form factors such as flexible and transient, which we have demonstrated through series of publications in high impact scientific journals. The article provides us an opportunity to summarize our work, as well as other works in this area of research which could help scientists and engineers to develop a multifunctional 3D e-skin system using these printers.
Abhishek Singh Dahiya
Northeastern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Printing semiconductor-based devices and circuits for flexible electronic skin, Applied Physics Reviews, December 2024, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0217297.
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