In-Package Additively Manufactured Sensors for Bend Prediction and Calibration of Flexible Phased Arrays and Flexible Hybrid Electronics

An additively manufactured in-package flex sensor for accurate bending prediction of flexible phased arrays is introduced. The sensor design is thin, flexible and accurate and can be readily embedded within a flexible phased array/Flexible Hybrid Electronics(FHE) package. Additively manufactured flexible phased arrays can be easily integrated with this proposed sensor using an all additive process. A series of bending tests were performed to measure the accuracy of the bending prediction for a proof-of-concept phased array. Using the dataset collected, the sensor can achieve 90 % accuracy in predicting the bend radius in both directions over the phased array plane. Using a 29 GHz 15×15 element phased array model, results in an 1.04 dB average gain error per missclassification and only 0.071 dB error in total as compared to 10.2 dB average gain error when using a non-calibrated equally phased array. This approach could be easily expanded to include multiple bend axis for larger arrays and flexible packages allowing for the accurate detection of non-radial, irregular bends.