FULLY PRINTED RADIO FREQUENCY ELECTRONICS: FLEXIBLE, WEARABLE AND DISPOSABLE

Abstract

With the advent of wearable sensors and internet of things (IoT), there is a new focus on electronics which can be bent so that they can be worn or mounted on non-planar objects. Due to large volume (billions of devices), there is a requirement that the cost is extremely low, to the extent that they become disposable. The flexible and low-cost aspects can be addressed through additive manufacturing technologies such as inkjet, screen and 3D printing. This talk introduces additive manufacturing as an emerging technique to realize low cost, flexible, wearable antennas and sensors for IoT applications. The ability to print electronics on unconventional mediums such as plastics, papers, and textiles has opened up a plethora of new applications. In this talk, various innovative antenna and sensor designs will be shown that have been realized through additive manufacturing. A multilayer process will be presented where dielectrics are also printed in addition to the metallic parts, thus demonstrating fully printed components. Many new functional inks and their use in tunable and reconfigurable RF components will be shown. In the end, many system level examples will be shown, primarily for wireless sensing applications. The promising results of these designs indicate that the day when electronics can be printed like newspapers and magazines through roll-to-roll and reelto-reel printing is not far away.