Large Area Cost-Efficient Electronics Systems Integration

Polymer electronic is expected to be a promising technology for low-cost and large-area electronic systems to support information and communication technology, sensor networks, life sciences, medical and bio-sensing devices, which can not easily be addressed by traditional chip technology. Solutions of polymer or polymer based pastes offer advantages due to their easy processing possibilities which give the opportunity to coat and pattern them like a printing ink. Hence reel-to-reel manufacturing with endless substrates of foil is a key technology to fulfil the challenging cost demands of cheap flexible systems. However printing resolution and registration as well as the electrical performance of polymer materials request at present still a hybrid approach based on most-polymer materials and partially-printed technologies to reach reasonable performance of systems. The process integration presented is based on a photolithographic process for the first level based on metallized foils, which is used to pattern the first interconnect and electrode layer with low resistance and high resolution compared to printing. With two subsequent lacquering and three screen printing steps for example polymer field effect transistors as well as sensors and actuators are integrated to circuits. Moreover this approach enables the possibility to use such functional flexible foil substrates for the hetero-integration of cost-efficient systems merging thin silicon chips with further thin, flexible or printed electronic components, sensors actuators batteries displays and even micro-fluidics and -pneumatics on a foil substrate. This paper prevents an overview over the hybride heterointegration approach for flexible electronic foil systems so-called polytronics developed at Fraunhofer IZM [1,2].