This book illustrates a variety of circuit designs on plastic foils and provides all the information needed to undertake successful designs in large-area electronics. The authors demonstrate architectural, circuit, layout, and device solutions and explain the reasons and the creative process behind each. Readers will learn how to keep under control large-area technologies and achieve robust, reliable circuit designs that can face the challenges imposed by low-cost low-temperature high-throughput manufacturing.

Covering both TFT technologies, and the theory and practice of circuit design, this book equips engineers with the technical knowledge and hands-on skills needed to make circuits on foil with organic or metal oxide based TFTs for applications such as flexible displays and RFID. It provides readers with a solid theoretical background and gives an overview of current TFT technologies including device architecture, typical parameters, and a theoretical framework for comparing different logical families. Concrete, real-world design cases, such as RFID circuits, and organic and metal oxide TFT-based 8-bit microprocessors, enable readers to grasp the practical potential of these design techniques and how they can be applied. This is an essential guide for students and professionals who need to make better transistors on foil.

This book describes new approaches to fabricate complementary organic electronics and focuses on the design of circuits and practical systems created using these manufacturing approaches. The authors describe two state-of-the-art, complementary organic technologies, characteristics and modeling of their transistors and their capability to implement circuits and systems on foil. Readers will benefit from the valuable overview of the challenges and opportunities that these extremely innovative technologies provide.

This thesis reports on an outstanding research advance in the development of Application Specific Printed Electronic (ASPE) circuits. It proposes the novel Inkjet-Configurable Gate Array (IGA) concept as a design-manufacturing method for the direct mapping of digital functions on top of new prefabricated structures. The thesis begins by providing details on the generation of the IGA bulk, and subsequently presents Drop-on-Demand configurable methodologies for the metallization of IGAs. Lastly, it demonstrates IGAs’ suitability for personalization and yield improvement, and reports on the integration of various circuits into IGA bulk. In addition to highlighting novel results, the thesis also offers a comprehensive introduction to printed electronics, from technology development, to design methods, tools and kits.

Offers details on the utilization of electrical heating elements in consumer appliance design and industrial processes. The text includes basic theory, metallurgy and production advice for developing more reliable and cost-effective heaters. It provides tables comparing resistivity and surface resistance of different materials, and listing the resistance and weight per metre as well as surface per ohm of whole and half B&S wire and ribbon sizes for common standard resistance heating alloys. The book also contains calculation equations suitable for use in BASIC programs.

Recent years have witnessed significant research efforts in flexible organic and amorphous-metal-oxide analogue electronics, in view of its formidable potential for applications such as smart sensor systems. This Element provides a comprehensive overview of this growing research area. After discussing the properties of organic and amorphous-metal-oxide technologies relevant to analogue circuits, this Element focuses on their application to two key circuit blocks: amplifiers and analogue-to-digital converters. The Element thus provides a fresh look at the evolution and immediate opportunities of the field, and identifies the remaining challenges for these technologies to become the platform of choice for flexible analogue electronics.

This book reports on the design, fabrication and characterization of a set of flexible electronic components, including on-foil sensors, organic thin-film transistors and ultra-thin chips. The core of the work is on showing how to combine high-performance integrated circuits with large-area electronic components on a single polymeric foil, to realize smart electronic systems for different applications, such as temperature, humidity and mechanical stress sensors. The book offers an extensive introduction to Hybrid System-in-Foil technology (HySiF), and related on-chip/on-foil passive and active components. It presents six case studies designed to highlight key HySiF challenges, together with the methodology to address those challenges. Last but not least, it describes the development of a reconfigurable, energy-efficient Analog-to-Digital Converter for HySiF. All in all, this book provides readers with extensive information on the state of the art in the design and characterization of integrated circuits and hybrid electronic systems on flexible polymeric substrates. By describing significant advances in organic thin-film transistor technology, this work is expected to pave the way to future developments in the area of energy-efficient smart sensors and integrated circuits.