Optimized Stress Testing for Flexible Hybrid Electronics Designs

Flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) is emerging as a promising solution to combine the benefits of printed electronics and silicon technology. FHE has many high-impact potential areas, such as wearable applications, health monitoring, and soft robotics, due to its physical advantages, which include light weight, low cost and the ability conform to different shapes. However, physical deformations in the field can lead to significant testing and validation challenges. For example, designers must ensure that FHE devices continue to meet their specs even when the components experience stress due to bending. Hence, physical deformation, which is hard to emulate, has to be part of the test procedures for FHE devices. This paper is the first to analyze stress experience at different parts of FHE devices under different bending conditions. We develop a novel methodology to maximize the test coverage with minimum number of text vectors with the help of a mixed integer linear programming formulation. We validate the proposed approach using an FHE prototype and COMSOL Multiphysics simulations.