The company is decoding performance with sweat-reading biowearables. Digital health startup Epicore Biosystems, makers of noninvasive biowearables, secured $10M in an oversubscribed Series A round. Its microfluidic (aka sweat-analyzing) patch is capable of measuring hydration, stress, and blood glucose levels — attracting a range of industries where performance is everything. A Performance Patch In partnership with PepsiCo’s Gatorade, the company’s Gx Sweat Patch launched in March 2021. The small, sensor-packed sticker is applied to an exerciser’s forearm, providing real-time hydration recommendations via a smartphone app for optimal athletic performance and refueling — a focus area for the beverage market at large. Its FDA-approved Discovery Patch System goes a step further, reading biomarkers in sweat to reveal personalized insights on stress and glucose levels, in addition to hydration needs. Now, this ability to monitor and manage performance is gaining steam beyond athletics. This latest funding round saw participation from Alumni Ventures, Joyance Partners, and, notably, Chevron Technology Ventures, who wrapped up a field study for monitoring heat stress in oilfield workers this past May. Early adopters also include the US Air Force, US Army, and National Institutes of Health, signaling broad applicability in human performance. Sweat is Data The next generation of health wearables is upon us, taking all sorts of form factors — rings, contact lenses, apparel, and rap...

Dr Isaac Rosen,
Senior Scientific Researcher at Copprint Contact us info@copprint.com Visit our virtual booth My name is Isaac Rosen, and I lead an R&D team at Copprint where we work on the development of future products as well as solving customer challenges. I am responsible for our activities to create a process for soldering on conductive traces.
Electrical component assembly on printed electronics is primarily achieved today with ECAs, a strike difference from the practice in traditional electronics manufacturing where soldering is standard. This difference arises mainly from the difficulties in soldering on printed silver traces. Copprint pastes are copper-based, enabling excellent electrical properties that outperform silver pastes – higher conductivity and lower cost. It is possible to solder on traces formed with Copprint paste using standard off-the-shelf solder pastes. Strong solder bonds are formed with small resistors soldered on FR4, with up to 4 kgf needed to disconnect (via die shear force measurements). Figure 1: Copprint copper paste, PCB with soldered components. Visit our virtual booth. Copprint develops and manufactures conductive copper paste for various applications, including PCB board printing, membrane switches, RFID tags, and PV cells. We have copper pastes suitable for multiple substrates such as FR4, Paper, Glass, PI, PET, and more. Copprints product portfolio can be found here, including links inside for TDS, MSDS, application notes, and how-to ...

Researchers have developed a 46-inch woven display with smart sensors, energy harvesting and storage integrated directly into the fabric. An international team of scientists has produced a fully woven smart textile display that integrates active electronic, sensing, energy, and photonic functions. The functions are embedded directly into the fibers and yarns, which are manufactured using textile-based industrial processes. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, say their approach could lead to applications that sound like sci-fi: curtains that are also TVs, energy-harvesting carpets, and interactive, self-powered clothing and fabrics. This is the first time that a scalable large-area complex system has been integrated into textiles using an entirely fiber-based manufacturing approach. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Communications. Despite recent progress in the development of smart textiles, their functionality, dimensions, and shapes are limited by current manufacturing processes. Integrating specialized fibers into textiles through conventional weaving or knitting processes means they could be incorporated into everyday objects, which opens up a huge range of potential applications. However, to date, the manufacturing of these fibers has been size limited, or the technology has not been compatible with textiles and the weaving process. To make the technology compatible with weaving, the researchers coated each fiber component with material...

- Can They Be Competitive On The Battery Market Within Automotive Applications?
Speaker: Ines Miller | Company: P3 | Date: 9-10 Feb 2022 | Full Presentation
Increasing battery demand and requirements towards high performance cells are pushing lithium-ion technology to its limits. Recent developments in solid-state technology have led to a high level of media attention, and both start-ups and large cell manufacturers are intensively working on the industrialization of their next-generation technology as major challenge. The competitiveness of currently leading players regarding technology, scalability and costs aspects will be evaluated and discussed in the presentation. Join TechBlick on an annual pass to join all live online conference or online version of onsite conference access library of on-demand talks (600 talks + PDFs) portfolio of expert led masterclass year-round platform https://www.techblick.com/ Our next battery-related event will take place on 15-16 FEB 2023, covering 1) Solid-State Batteries: Innovations, Promising Start-Ups, & Future Roadmap 2) Battery Materials: Next-Generation & Beyond Lithium Ion The speakers include: General Motors, Graphenix Development, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fraunhofer IKTS, RWTH Aachen University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Meta Materials Inc, Skeleton Technologies, Solid State Battery Inc, Argonne National Laboratories, OneD Battery Sciences, VTT, Leyden Jar Technologies B.V., b-Scie...

America’s growing demand for electric vehicles (EVs) has shed light on the significant challenge of sustainably sourcing the battery technology necessary for the broad shift to renewable electricity and away from fossil fuels. In hopes of making batteries that not only perform better than those currently used in EVs but also are made from readily available materials, a group of Drexel University chemical engineers have found a way to introduce sulfur into lithium-ion batteries – with astounding results. With global sales of EVs more than doubling in 2021, prices of battery materials like lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt surged and supply chains for these raw materials, most of which are sourced from other countries, became bottlenecked due to the pandemic. This also focused attention on the primary providers of the raw materials: countries like Congo and China; and raised questions about the human and environmental impact of extracting them from the earth. Well before the EV surge and battery material shortage, developing a commercially viable sulfur battery has been the battery industry’s sustainable, high-performing white whale. This is because of sulfur’s natural abundance and chemical structure that would allow it to store more energy. A recent breakthrough by researchers in Drexel’s College of Engineering, published in the journal Communications Chemistry, provides a way to sidestep the obstacles that have subdued Li-S batteries in the past, finally pulling t...

A new research project is setting out to find a solution to the growing problem of electronic waste by creating the world’s first controlled degradable integrated circuits. Researchers from the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering have won a £1.5m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the project. Their work could help address the growing problem of toxic waste created during the manufacture and disposal of common electronic items like computers, mobile phones, and fitness trackers. In 2019 alone, consumers threw away more than 53 million tonnes of electronic waste, much of which contain hazardous waste in components like batteries and circuit boards. It is estimated that less than 20% of this is properly recycled and the scale of the problem is growing each year. The Glasgow team will work with a range of industrial and governmental partners to develop high-performance electronic materials which can be safely disposed of at the end of their useful lives. This includes designing electronics that are more easily recycled into new forms or by using components that naturally degrade altogether to form benign by-products. The project, known as Green Energy-Optimised Printed Transient Integrated Circuits, or GEOPIC, builds on existing expertise at the University’s Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) group. Researchers from the BEST group have already developed numerous new forms of electronics, includ...

Speaker: Jedrzej Kufel | Company: ARM | Date: 11-12 May 2021 | Full Presentation Conventional silicon technology has embedded at least one integrated circuit into every smart device on Earth. However, it faces key challenges to make everyday objects smarter. Cost is the most important factor but flexibility and conformability are highly desirable. Our approach is to develop integrated circuits using flexible electronic fabrication techniques, thus paving the way towards natively-flexible LSI and VLSI ICs. Jedrzej Kufel Staff Research Engineer @ Arm Bio Dr Jedrzej Kufel is a Staff Research Engineer. He joined Arm in 2014, working in the IoT product team before moving to Research in 2016. His current interests are in the area of low-power integrated circuit design using flexible/printed electronics, validation and test methodologies and circular economy. Jedrzej holds a MEng in Mechatronics and Robotic Systems from University of Liverpool and a PhD from University of Southampton. Join TechBlick on an annual pass to join all live online conference or online version of onsite conference access library of on-demand talks (600 talks + PDFs) portfolio of expert led masterclass year-round platform https://www.techblick.com/ And do NOT miss our flagship event in Berlin on 17-18 OCT 2023 focused on Reshaping the Future of Electronics. This event attracts 550-600 participants from all the world and offers a superb ambience and dynamic exhibition floor. To learn more visit https://www...

SmartNanotubes Technologies, a German startup that has developed the world’s first micro power multi-channel gas detector chip for the mass market, has raised € 2.4 million in its Series A funding round. Lead investors are Cottonwood Technology Fund and duotec GmbH. Game changer in the gas sensor market
SmartNanotubes Technologies, based near Dresden, operates on the principle of an electronic
nose similar to the array of receptors in the human nose. Current gas sensor arrays are expensive, large in size, and characterized by low sensitivity and high power consumption. The carbon nanotubes chips of SmartNanotubes, however, are highly sensitive, energy-efficient,
compact, and low-cost. SmartNanotubes is a game-changer in the gas sensor market as its chips
can measure multiple gases while most existing technologies can only detect one gas at a time. Product quality, safety, and security
In a team of four people, Dr. Viktor Bezugly and Dr. Birte Sönnichsen co-founded SmartNanotubes in the summer of 2020 after a three-year know-how transfer project at LifeScience Inkubator (LSI). Bezugly started his research on carbon nanotubes at DresdenUniversity of Technology twelve years ago. “I’m delighted to make my research available to the public by setting up this company. As of now, our target markets include product quality in materials, food, and medical applications,’’ said Viktor Bezugly. “Other areas include safety and security in transport, consumer goods, and manufacturin...