Flexible consumer electronics—for applications such as displays, lighting, and photovoltaics—are becoming increasingly popular. These varied devices provide utility because of their unique properties—they are lightweight, bendable, conformable, rugged, and non-brittle. Interest in affixing electronics to flexible substrates can be traced to research on flexible solar panels for space missions in the 1960s. During that time, reliable, compact, and lightweight devices capable of providing power in the 1- to 50-kW range were not widely available, and a large array of solar cells on flexible substrates was studied as a means to address the issue.
Exponent has an experienced team of scientists and engineers who are contributors and have published many of the leading-edge papers to the organic and silicon-based flexible electronics field and are involved in developing both organic and silicon-based solid-state devices for flexible electronics applications.
The team has broad knowledge of the constituent chemistry and materials, manufacturing and processing techniques including:
- Roll- to-roll processing
- Physical vapor deposition
- Plasma deposition
Exponent engineers also have expertise in optical design and characterization methods, and semiconductor devices and electronic circuits used in flexible electronics including:
- Thin-Film Transistors TFTs
- Organic Thin-Film Transistors OTFTs
- Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Device AMOLED
- Solid-State Lighting: Organic Light Emitting Diodes OLEDs
- Sensor Arrays
- Solar Cells
- Radio-Frequency Identification Tags RFID