Out of a Sci-fi movie: Flexible Electronics

The emerging advances in the thin-film materials and devices have augmented many developments in the field of flexible electronics. Flexible electronics are one of the technologies having broadest range of innovative products. The flexible electronic market is experiencing a growth as it is increasingly being adopted in a number of applications that leverage its light weight, low profile and favorable dielectric properties. This technology has been successful in gaining popularity as it is used in a wide range of applications such as solar cells, bio-sensors, RFID tags, e-paper, e-skin, wireless power and signal transmission sheets and flexible display.

Flexible Electronics Market

A wide range of applications have been developed using this technology such as computational systems, displays, e-textiles, in energy storage and generation and healthcare. The flexibility of electronic materials is proven to be attractive in medical and bioengineering. Flexible electronics have capability of bringing greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness to healthcare applications. The majority of the medical devices are limited to the use of glass making them rigid, heavy and breakable. For instance, amorphous silicon-based X-ray detectors are made on glass that weigh a few kilograms on the basis of size. The glass on which the sensor is made as well as the housing that protects the glass from breaking in case of a drop is responsible for such weight. With such housing, cost and complexity are additionally added to the X-ray sensor that is not incurred by an X-ray sensor based on plastic. Furthermore, an X-ray detector based on plastic is significantly lighter in contrast to glass-based detector. Such benefits provided by the characteristics of this technology contribute to the growth of flexible electronics market. 

Application in medical devices: 

X-ray detectors: Amorphous silicon FPDs can be replaced with organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) arrays for making light weight and cost-effective flexible X-ray detectors for general radiography, mammography and fluoroscopy. The ultra-low leakage advantage of OTFTs brings direct sensitivity benefits to X-ray detection. 

Make OTFT arrays can be used on plastics for making devices that are more compact and disposable in comparable to traditional devices that are made on glass that can be breakable. 

Health monitoring devices: These are the wearable devices for tracking health characteristics of the patients. These can be made lighter, and shatterproof having flexible displays and sensors. 

Flexible electronics in next-generation consumer electronics: 

Moreover, flexible electronics is found to be attractive for next-generation consumer electronics and soon will be part of everyday lives of the people. Such technology owing to its paper thin and lightweight serves as a perfect technological advancement, to be used for mobile phones and wearable electronics. All the established global players along with their research team are working together and patenting their innovation associated with flexible technology. Though flexible screens have been in market since 2013 such as G Flex phone with a screen that rolls up like poster, a completely bendable commercial smartphone is yet to hit the market. 

Many players in the flexible electronic market such as LG, Apple, Samsung, Nokia, and Microsoft are working on this technology for the development of foldable smartphones. A patent has been filed by LG in January 2017, for its 'version' of a smartphone-to-tablet foldable device. Moreover, Samsung is about to launch a smartphone with foldable display in November 2018. Such efforts by the established global players and innovation made by them has promised to make it cost-effective. Such technology can bring a lot of benefits to the consumer electronics, most important being the cost-effectiveness to the industry. 

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Anurag Tiwari
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