CHAMPAIGN — Arrhythmic hearts soon may beat in time again, with minimal surgical invasion, thanks to flexible electronics technology developed by a team of University of Illinois researchers, in collaboration with the University of

Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Northwestern University. These biocompatible silicon devices could mark the beginning of a new wave of surgical electronics.

Co-senior author John Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder Chair in Engineering Innovation and a professor of materials science and engineering at Illinois, and his team will publish their breakthrough in the cover story of the March 24 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

Several treatments are available for hearts that dance to their own tempo, ranging from pacemaker implants to cardiac ablation therapy, a process that selectively targets and destroys clusters of arrhythmic cells. Current techniques require multiple electrodes placed on the tissue in a time-consuming, point-by-point process to construct a patchwork cardiac map. In addition, the difficulty of connecting rigid, flat sensors to soft, curved tissue impedes the electrodes’ ability to monitor and stimulate the heart.

Rogers and his team have built a flexible sensor array that can wrap around the heart to map large areas of tissue at once. The array contains 2,016 silicon nanomembrane transistors, each monitoring electricity coursing through a beating heart.

The Pennsylvania team demonstrated the transistor array on the beating hearts of live pigs, a common model for human hearts. They witnessed a high-resolution, real-time display of the pigs’ pulsing cardiac tissues – something never before possible.

“We believe that this technology may herald a new generation of devices for localizing and treating abnormal heart rhythms,” said co-senior author Brian Litt, of the University of Pennsylvania.

“This allows us to apply the full power of silicon electronics directly to the tissue,” said Rogers, a renowned researcher in the area of flexible, stretchable electronics. As the first class of flexible electronics that can directly integrate with bodily tissues, “these approaches might have the potential to redefine design strategies for advanced surgical devices, implants, prosthetics and more,” he said.

The biocompatible circuits – the first ones unperturbed by immersion in the body’s salty fluids – represent a culmination of seven years of flexible electronics study by Rogers’ group. The researchers build circuits from ultrathin, single-crystal silicon on a flexible or stretchy substrate, like a sheet of plastic or rubber. The nanometer thinness of the silicon layer makes it possible to bend and fold the normally rigid semiconductor.

“If you can create a circuit that’s compliant and bendable, you can integrate it very effectively with soft surfaces in the body,” such as the irregular, constantly moving curves of the heart, Rogers said. 

Collaborations with a theoretical mechanics group at Northwestern University, led by Younggang Huang, yielded important insights into the designs.

The patchwork grid of cardiac sensors adheres to the moist surfaces of the heart on its own, with no need for probes or adhesives, and lifts off easily. The array of hundreds of sensors gives cardiac surgeons a more complete picture of the heart’s electrical activity so they can quickly find and fix any short circuits. In fact, the cardiac device boasts the highest transistor resolution of any class of flexible electronics for non-display applications.

The team’s next step is to adapt the technology for use with non-invasive catheter procedures, Rogers said. The U. of I. and Pennsylvania teams also are exploring applications for the arrays in neuroscience, applying grids to brain surfaces to study conditions of unusual electrical activity, such as epilepsy.

“It sets out a new design paradigm for interfacing electronics to the human body, with a multitude of possible applications in human health,” Rogers said.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health and the Klingenstein Foundation.

This report focuses on the requirements and achievements to date on the topic of flexible transparent conductors, where high transparency and high conductivity are required. Worldwide research and design efforts are presented, both from research institutes and companies that are developing the necessary materials and processes. Several technical solutions available are compared, and forecasts are given for the next 10 years. The importance of Transparent Conductive Films (TCF) Increasingly more and more flexible devices are required, from flexible displays for e-readers, OLEDs and other types to flexible photovoltaics and beyond. These devices require a conductor to close the layers of active materials, but that conductor needs to be transparent in applications such as displays and photovoltaics to allow light through. Today, transparent conductive oxides are widely used for rigid devices but these will become more expensive due to rare materials used, and are inadequate for most flexible electronics applications where they can easily crack under little strain. Alternatives are sought.

( http://www.bharatbook.com/Market-Research-Reports/Transparent-Conductive-Films-for-Flexible-Electronics.html )

The main materials available for this purpose are:

* Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs)
* Organic materials, such as the most common PEDOT:PSS
* Carbon nanotubes (CNT) and graphene

Each have trade-offs between conductivity, transmittance, and flexibility. Each can be patterned in different ways. While sputtering will remain an important and high-volume technology for coating of rigid substrates like glass, solution-based processes including printing and the use of organic and nanoparticle materials have already gained a lot of traction and are expected to dominate the market for the flexible applications within a few years. Significant new developments are being made with both the materials used and how they can be deposited. This report addresses the performance of the different options and profiles organizations around the world that are developing better solutions. The biggest opportunity In 2020, the biggest opportunity is for flexible OLEDs and flexible photovoltaics – however, both lack appropriate, low cost flexible barriers today, which delays the market penetration.

While ESD (electro static discharge) applications have moderate requirements concerning the properties of TCFs, demands in devices such as OLEDs are more complex. The main reason is that in that case, not only the standard properties as conductivity, transmittance and flexibility are important, but the interactions with other layers play an important role, namely charge carrier injection. In addition, for large area devices, homogeneity is more critical, especially when it comes to display and lighting applications. The human eye is more sensitive to changes in brightness than to changes in colour, and brightness of an light emitting device depends on the electrical conditions – voltage in the case of inorganic electroluminescence, current flow in the case of electrochromic and light-emitting semiconductors. Market forecasts 2010-2020 find that the market for TCFs will be $0.24 million in 2010 – mainly used in research and development and used in small quantities for commercial devices. By 2017 TCFs will become a billion dollar market for printed and potentially printed electronics, reaching $3.39 billion in 2020, mainly due to photovoltaics and OLED displays. The report gives forecasts by component for ten years.

Who should buy this report?
For those that seek to address opportunities in this field, learn the latest progress from around the world, the challenges and market potential, this report is a must. Activities of 35 organizations from across the globe are covered.

To know more and to buy a copy of your report feel free to visit : http://www.bharatbook.com/Market-Research-Reports/Transparent-Conductive-Films-for-Flexible-Electronics.html

The FlexTech Alliance contract will be used to fund Cambridge NanoTech’s development of its Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) coating system for fabricating plastic electronics over large-area and flexible substrates for making solar cells, biomedical devices, displays and other devices.

Since 2008 Cambridge NanoTech has been supplying its ALD processing equipment to silicon semiconductor and photonics research groups in Asia and the US. The technique has been developed as an alternative to evaporation, sputtering and chemical vapour deposition (CVD) and can be used to apply materials in and around 3D objects.

Roll-to-roll

The high-speed ALD system will be able to operate at the high volumes needed for commercial roll-to-roll production.

The technology is able to produce very thin-films scalable to large-area substrates using low temperature processing.

The engineering team at Cambridge NanoTech is focusing on reducing cycle time of the system. This will help to reduce the costs of producing thin films for flexible and organic electronic applications.

A beta system will be installed at the Flexible Display Centre at Arizona State University in 2012. In addition to designing and building the high-speed ALD system, Cambridge NanoTech is developing film processes that are applicable to electronics and display manufacturers.

Funding

Since 1994, the FlexTech Alliance (originally the US Display Consortium) has funded projects in display R&D. Typically funding is structured as a 50/50 cost share with the industry participant.

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) contributes to the alliance’s funding pot for allocation to technical projects, which it may benefit from exploiting for military applications as well as consumer.

Materials and precursors designed for the ALD thin-film process at Cambridge NanoTech include metals, semiconductors, insulators, oxides, nitrides, dielectrics, magnetic and refractive coatings. They have been developers by Strem Chemicals and Sigma-Aldrich.

source: http://www.plusplasticelectronics.com

These things are obviously just demos and proof of concept but it should be a fun decade or so when we start actually using these things in real life.

see video: Samsung AMOLED Showcase – FPD 2010

Organic polymer thin-film production is a multi-disciplinary research project at JCU. Dr Mohan Jacob leads the Electronic Material Research Group, whose members are drawn from Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Medicine.

The discovery that certain modified plastics can transmit electricity has excited research interest in developing electronic devices such as organic light-emitting devices (LEDs), organic thin-film transistors and organic photo detectors. These possibilities arise from the promise of being able to fine-tune the electrical and optical characteristics of the organic materials. There are also processing advantages such as fabrication at relatively low temperatures and using simple techniques like ink-jet printing.

These advantages will soon lead to the use of organic electronic devices in applications that are currently difficult or costly to achieve, like displays and sensor arrays on flexible or curved surfaces, such as e-books with roll-out screens. The search is now on for suitable materials to use in integrated circuit technology to replace conventional silicon-based technology.

To create semiconductor membranes, the Electronic Material Research Group designed a “plasma polymerisation” facility to create organic polymer thin-films. Plasma polymerisation is a powerful method to lay down a uniform thin layer of organic materials whose structure can be adjusted by changing a range of deposition parameters. The main assets of organic polymer thin-films are their resistance to heat and to aggressive chemicals, and their extreme thinness, typically between 200 and 800 nanometres (one million nanometres = one millimetre).

With support from the Rural Industries Research & Development Corporation, the group is attempting to fabricate high quality plasma polymerised thin-films using Australian essential oils as natural sources. Pinene from pine resin, limonene from citrus peel and tea tree oil were tested to see if they were suitable for polymerisation.

The cheaper pine and citrus oils produced membranes under the most ideal laboratory conditions, although their surface remained too rough. The polymer thin-films derived from tea tree oil, on the other hand, were as smooth as glass. Therefore, tea tree oil based thin-films appear to be good candidates for further development, with a focus on biomedical applications.

Contact: Dr Mohan Jacob mohan.jacob@jcu.edu.au

source: James Cook University – Australia

http://www.jcu.edu.au

The agency has developed the roadmap, in consultation with 23 technology and industry experts from R&D institutes, manufacturers and materials suppliers, to develop a $100 million (€72.9 million) industry that will create up to 1,500 jobs by 2017.

FlexMatters, the region’s cluster of research institutes and businesses developing flexible electronics technology and products, has recently won support under US federal and regional government support programmes, as well as $500,000 from the US Small Business Administration, awarded to NorTech to be directed towards helping small and mid-sized businesses target opportunities in flexible electronics.

Displays
In the field of plastic and printed electronics, Ohio’s IP capital resides in the Liquid Crystal Institute (LCI) at Kent State University and polymer research by the University of Akron. Research by LCI led to the founding of Kent Displays in 1993, a leading supplier of e-paper display technology, which it calls low-power LCD technology.

LCI scientists recently made advances in electrophoresis, where an applied electronic field is used to move particles dispersed in a fluid, a technique fundamental to the operation of an e-paper display. The researchers found a way to use a liquid crystal as the carrier fluid, enabling both direct and alternating electric fields to move charged or zero charged particles. The breakthrough, reported in Nature journal in October 2010, could advance display, as well as other fields such as biosciences.

The FlexMatters cluster also benefits from innovative manufacturing businesses. One of these is Sheffield Metals International, a steel processor that has begun producing roofing laminated with thin-film solar panels to target growing demand for building-integrated photovoltaics products.

source: http://www.nanotech-news.com

Wellesley, MA | Posted on October 21st, 2010

The largest segment of the market, inorganic material, is projected to increase at a CAGR of 6.7% to nearly $103 billion in 2015, after being valued at $74.2 billion in 2010.

The other segment, organic material, is estimated at $2.1 billion in 2010, but is expected to increase at a CAGR of 56.9% to reach nearly $20.3 billion in 2015.

Most of the hype surrounding transparent electronics is fueled by the exotic usage scenarios that it will engender: The idea of having electronic circuitry that is invisible to the human eye has few parallels in its appeal. There is an overwhelming popular discourse that this technology is being developed from scratch, when the reality is more mundane and humbling. Transparent electronics has been with us for at least 50 years.

The core of transparent electronics, the transparent conductor, is neither a recent discovery nor is it unexplored vis-à-vis applications. Transparent conducting oxides (TCO), in general, and indium tin oxide (ITO), in particular, have a long history of usage in consumer electronics as well as optical devices. They have been used for low-profile applications such as cathode-ray tubes, electromagnetic shielding and other applications. The demand for these requirements was steady but limited and there were seemingly no supply-side constraints.

This report divides the materials used for constructing transparent electronics components into the following categories: Inorganic material – Indium tin oxide and other inorganic material; and Organic material – Conducting polymers and carbon nanotubes (CNTs).

While an in-depth comparison of the pros and cons of organic and inorganic material is presented in the body of the report, there are two broad advantages that organic materials bring to the table: Better flexibility and malleability, and cost-effectiveness in the long run due to substantial supply side stability.

Transparent electronics is not a uniform science. It is rather a collection of several usage patterns and innovations that have often developed independently of each other. The technology and the market are clearly evolving at large; even among themselves, there are different stages of evolution. Transparent electronics has evolved around a set of usage scenarios: Solar/photovoltaic (PV) cells, touch surfaces, mainstream displays, and unconventional substrates.

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Wellesley, MA
Telephone: 866-285-7215

Source: BCC Research