Advances in Polyester Film Substrates for Flexible Electronics
Printed, Hybrid, Structural, & 3D Electronics 2021
10 May 2021
Online
TechBlick Platform
Continued advances in Flexible Hybrid Electronics have required material suppliers to deliver improved functionality to the device developers in broad applications such as sensors, displays, barrier films, photovoltaics, medical diagnostics, consumer electronics, HMI (Human Machine Interface), and Flexible Printed Circuits (FPCs).
Demands on the film substrate suppliers can vary widely, and polymer property requirements typically include: clean surfaces with low surface defects, optically clear films with low haze and iridescence, near zero thermal shrinkage for multilayer print registration and component attach via solder reflow, UV and Hydrolysis resistance, and VTM-0 Flame Retardance. Many requests also include an ability to further tailor the surface chemistry to improve and enhance the downstream processing performance. New commercial polyester film types have been introduced by DuPont Teijin Films, and their typical end use applications will be described.
Fraunhofer FEP performs Roll-to-Roll film processing, and they are developing transparent and robust permeation Barrier Films for Flexible Electronics. The substrate choice is critical for optimized performance, and Fraunhofer FEP will describe their journey and key learnings.
John Fahlteich
Group Leader coFlex | Deputy Head of Department R2R Technologies @ Fraunhofer FEP
Bio
Dr. John Fahlteich born 1981, graduated from the University of Leipzig with a diploma in physics in 2005. In 2010, he earned a PhD from the Technical University of Chemnitz with a thesis about vacuum deposited permeation barrier layers. In total, he has now 15 years of experience in Roll-to-Roll Thin Film Coating on Plastic Web. John is a Research Group Leader in the Business Unit “Plasma Technology” at Fraunhofer FEP. As of today, he published over 40 papers, conference contributions and patents as well as three book chapters in the field. John is currently principal consortium coordinator of three Horizon 2020 funded Projects (Switch2Save, NanoQI, and the Open Innovation Test Bed FlexFunction2Sustain).
