Agenda

Medical wearables are rapidly transforming the healthcare landscape, holding immense potential to revolutionize preventive care, disease management, and patient engagement. As the demand increases, the construction of such device require to merge very diverse technologies and to make them work together. The expansion of biosensors, their integration into wearable sensors together with skin adhesive and flexible materials, and the continuous growth of communication technologies such as NFC and Bluetooth lead to infinite combination for another level of medical monitoring.

The "trillion-sensor economy" metatrend prophecy is coming true. To realize its full potential in an effective and responsible manner, a re-think in the way sensing systems are manufactured, exploited and recycled, is necessary. Printed Electronics is emerging as a key-enabler for large-scale and sustainable manufacturing of sensing systems. TracXon, a fully-integrated foundry for Printed Electronics, is helping several B2B customers in realizing their ambition to be part of this trillion-sensor economy. In this talk, some application examples are presented.

​

Sustainability has become one of essential part of a product life cycle and biomedical industry is not an exception rather it is one of major industry using wide ranges of single use medical products. Addressing sustainability of these products is important especially due to their biohazard nature and sanitation issues. This presentation will cover ongoing effort to address cost and sustainability issues of single use devices through use of Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE) manufacturing, evaluation of novel materials usage, introduction of environmentally conscious design practices, and life cycle assessment methodologies. Examples of two additively manufactured demonstrators: single-use vital sign monitor system (SUVSM) and single-use ECG leads (SUEL) will be discussed showing feasibility and benefits of FHE manufacturing approach.

​

​

Over the past decade, there’s been tremendous advancements in soft and highly stretchable circuitry for use in epidermal electronics for health monitoring, wearable computing, and soft robotics. As these technologies continue to improve, there is increasing interest in new material architectures that allow for manufacturing scale-up, printability over large areas, and robust interfacing with surface-mounted microelectronics. One promising approach is to use metal alloys like eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn) that are liquid at room temperature and which can be incorporated as microfluidic inclusions within a soft elastomer substrate. As the surrounding elastomers stretches, the fluidic inclusions can elongate and maintain electrical connectivity. Moreover because of their high electrical conductivity, EGaIn can support digital circuit functionality and potentially replace the rigid metallic interconnects that are used in current circuit boards. In this talk, I will present several approaches for using EGaIn as electrical interconnects and conductive inks for stretchable electronics. This includes efforts to create circuits composed of microfluidic channels of liquid metal that directly interface with the pins of packaged microelectronic chips. I will also present recent efforts to combine EGaIn and soft elastomers to create composite materials composed of percolating networks of microscale EGaIn droplets (along with other metallic particles) within a soft elastomer matrix. Soft polymers blended with liquid metal exhibit unique combinations of high electrical or thermal conductivity, high stretchability, and low elastic stiffness. In particular, I will show how these composites can be formulated to function as printable conductive inks and thermal interface materials. Applications include soft printed circuits that maintain stable electrical resistance under strain, elastic transducers capable of sensing and actuation, and thermal interface materials for high performance computing.

Bio: Carmel Majidi is the Clarence H. Adamson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Soft Machines Lab. His research group develops novel material architectures that allow machines and electronics to be soft, elastically deformable, and biomechanically compatible. This includes research with liquid metal and shape memory materials for creating “artificial” skin, nervous tissue, and muscle for applications in soft robotics and wearable computing. Prof. Majidi has received Young Investigator awards from DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, and NASA, is an author on >200 journal publications, has 28 issued patents, and is co-founder of several spin-off companies.

C3Nano’s technology is currently being utilized in tens of millions of flagship smartphones and has enabled some of the earliest commercial foldable devices. Recently, C3Nano extended its Activegrid™ transparent conducting ink and film product lines to address fundamental issues in transparent heating and thermal management for the automotive and cleantech sectors. In the first part of this presentation, we will discuss how Activegrid™ is being developed and adopted for a variety of transparent heating and thermal management solutions due to several important value propositions, including excellent optical clarity in the visible (camera) and LiDAR regions, direct coating and deposition on 3D substrates like PC, and outstanding formability. Additionally, major proprietary breakthroughs by C3Nano have led to the development of new classes of highly concentrated silver nanowire-based dispersions with exceptional properties. In the second part of the talk, we will describe the advantages of nanowires as conductive fillers in inks and composites over conventional fillers like silver nanoparticles, flakes, and carbon black/nanotubes. Record low loadings < 5% and less than 10 wt.% total Silver (i.e., more than 90% resin in the final cured composite) can yield composites with remarkably low resistivities (10-3 to 10-4 ohm-cm, 1000 S/cm to 10,000 S/cm range). This allows our customers and partners to develop the next generation of inks and ECAs to address fundamental problems in consumer electronics, semiconductors packaging, and the automotive and life science sectors.

2022 healthcare spending in the U.S. alone was $4.5 trillion and grew at an annual rate of 5.3% between 2017 and 2022. The sheer size of the market provides a major opportunity for suppliers at all points of the value chain, especially if they have enabling technology that facilitates the megatrends surrounding healthcare. These drivers include: A rapidly growing elderly population due to increased life expectancy. Technology advancement is growing at the rate of Moore’s law, driven by device miniaturization. The availability of huge data, driving the use of artificial intelligence and data analytics. An increasing focus on cost reduction. A tightening labor market, which has led to staff shortages, especially for nurses. A stringent regulatory environment, which slows approval of new products. An increased awareness of health and fitness by consumers, leading to wider adoption of wearables. These drivers have resulted in a rapid shift in point of care from the provider to ambulatory, home, and virtual care options. Also, the increasing availability of low-cost portable and wearable sensors facilitates the shift to remote points of care.For decades, functional electronic inks have proven to be a dependable, cost-efficient and energy efficient technology for highly reliable electronic circuitry and components, especially for medical devices. One of the main advantages over other processes is that functional electronic inks use an additive process, whereas the various conductor, resistor, and dielectric pastes are screen-printed or deposited by other means, then cured or fired in succession to form the circuit or electrode. This reduces waste. Also, most functional electronic inks have been developed without toxic substances subject and are RoHS and REACH compliant. Screens are relatively easy to manufacture and allow for flexibility in circuit design. Screen printing technology is capable of feature sizes from hundreds of microns down to 30 microns or less. The continuing drive to print smaller and thinner features enables device miniaturization. Functional electronic inks may be tailored for new form factors such as 3D, flexible, and stretchable substrates. These unique advantages make functional electronic inks the technology of choice for medical device electronics and medical sensors.In this presentation, we will summarize how functional electronic inks enable current and future devices that directly address the trends in the healthcare industry. Heraeus Electronics, with its extensive portfolio of functional electronic inks and pastes and matched systems is in a prime position to support these advancements.

​

Society 5.0: Envisioning a future where man, machine, AI and the environment co-exist and thrive in harmony. How we can foster the development of the ecosystem needed to transform the way people connect to and interact with the world.

Active smart textiles are reaching a turning point, moving from systems that collect low-rate data from the wearer to complex, distributed systems that collect large amounts of data from the surrounding environment. This move is pushing on the demands of integration, power, and on-textile data analysis. SRI International is leading a team as part of the IARPA SMART ePANTS program where we will integrate an audio recording system into a garment.In this talk, I will discuss the challenges to integration and our approach to solving them. I will discuss our audio recording performance thus far, as well as some potential options for on-garment power.Further, I will discuss how we work collaboratively with our garment designers to integrate the entire system into a wearable garment that is both stylish and high performing.

Due to the lack of standardization for components often used in the development of soft systems, the system integration design role often requires a complex set of material decisions to be made, often with a lack of performance data, both in the textile and electrical domains. This results in a significantly longer time from idea to prototype to production product, and a commensurately heavier investment than the typical electronic system requires. To open the design space to soft systems, AFFOA is developing a library of fully tested components to augment the datasheets provided by the manufacturers, along with combining system integration techniques to these components to test their in-device performance.

Using Magnetically Aligned ZTACH® ACE
Smart label product tags (e.g. RFID tags) are ubiquitous for inventory control and asset security but require ever more functionality to support the Internet of Things (IoT). There are many options on the market for functional die with advanced capabilities beyond ID logging, such as environmental or positional recording. However, these chips are often designed for wire bonding interconnection; preventing them from being readily used in Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE) applications. SunRay Scientific will present success of flip chip attachment of a commercially available NFC bare die designed for wire bonding using a standard SMT line. The die were attached using a novel anisotropic conductive epoxy, ZTACH® ACE, for flexible hybrid electronics (FHE). Implementation of a successful interconnection with flip-chip bonding is nontrivial, but there are significant advantages to be found with success. Attaching a die using a flip-chip bonding requires fewer process steps than wire bonding. The size of the circuit is significantly reduced through the elimination of the wire bond pads around the periphery of the die. Flip chip bonding is also more amenable to the materials used in FHE than wire bonding. These advantages combined with the low temperature and high-speed processing of ZTACH set the stage for mass produced inexpensive connected FHE sensors. The ZTACH® ACE material is composed of a binary epoxy resin loaded with ferromagnetic particles that have a high electrical conductivity coating. During the curing of the epoxy, a magnetic field is applied
using SunRay’s patented ZMAG® Magnetic Pallet, causing the ferromagnetic particles to align in columns forming a low electrical resistivity path through the thickness of the epoxy (and between the components and matching bonding pads), while maintaining very high electrical isolation laterally between pads. The epoxy upon cure also serves as an underfill eliminating the need for an additional process step. ZTACH® ACE material and processing reshapes current FHE packaging via single-step packaging of mixed electronic components that otherwise cannot handle elevated pressure and high temperature during assembly. Additionally, lower profile component attachment is enabled on flexible substrates so smart labels are not limited by rigidity and thickness, allowing addition of security features and integrated sensing, while decreasing costs and meeting performance requirements. This emerging anisotropic conductive epoxy is compatible with SMT lines’ sheet-to-sheet (S2S) processing. The goal of this talk will be to demonstrate the possibilities of transitioning existing wire-bondable functional bare die to FHE systems using ZTACH® ACE and existing SMT infrastructure. With additional process development, this approach of enabling manufacture of enhanced capability IoT systems using existing die and SMT infrastructure could be made widely available to US contract manufacturers.

​