Textile Electronics for EM Applications

Flexible electronics have proven their usefulness for applications where bendability, stretchability, wearability, portability, and lightness are needed. These include wearable health and fitness sensors as well as foldable and deployable antennas for space and aerospace utilization. A common approach for realizing flexible electronics is to employ plastic substrates and print circuits on them. However, an alternative and more adaptable approach consists in using textile substrates. The latter offers the same advantages as plastic and mylar substrates but is better suited for wearable applications considering how effortlessly textiles can be integrated into clothing. Since textile substrates have already demonstrated reliable performance up to 6 GHz, they are also suitable for radio frequency (RF) applications. Nevertheless, creating textile electronics with optimal RF characteristics presents its own challenges, ranging from conductivity characterization to durability. The fabrication process can have a major impact on the properties of the textile substrate and associated printed electronics, and this will be the focus of our work.