Category Archives: Flexible Displays

As the popularity and penetration of wearable and mobile devices increase, so too will demand for innovative flexible displays. In fact, revenue from flexible displays is expected to increase more than 300 percent, from just $3.7 billion in 2016 to $15.5 billion in 2022. Flexible displays will comprise 13 percent of total display market revenue in 2020, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS).

Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics launched the first smartphones with flexible active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays in 2013, and both companies continue to adapt flexible AMOLED displays for their smartphones, smartwatches and fitness trackers. Inspired by these successes, other mobile manufacturers are now developing their own flexible-display devices.

“The varieties of flexible displays include screens that are bendable, curved and edge-curved, but fully foldable form factors are expected within the next two years,” said Jerry Kang, principal analyst of display research for IHS Technology. “Only a few suppliers — including Samsung Display, LG Display, E-ink and Futaba — are now regularly supplying flexible displays to the market. However, many more panel makers are now attempting to build flexible display capacity, leveraging the latest AMOLED display technology.”

According to the IHS Flexible Display Market Tracker, flexible displays are primarily used in smartphones and smartwatches in 2016; however, use in other applications, including tablet PCs, near-eye virtual reality devices, automotive monitors and OLED TVs is expected by 2022. “Consumer device manufacturers will eventually need to innovate their conventionally designed flat, rectangular form-factors to make way for the latest curved, foldable and rollable screens,” Kang said.

Flex_Display_Chart_IHS

By Ed Korczynski, Sr. Technical Editor

Medical and health/wellness monitoring devices provide critical information to improve quality-of-life and/or human life-extension. To meet the anticipated product needs of wearable comfort and relative affordability, sensors and signal-processing circuits generally need to be flexible. The SEMICON West 2016 Flexible Electronics Forum provided two days of excellent presentations by industry experts on these topics, and the second day focused on the medical applications of flexible circuits.

Flexible ultra-thin silicon

While thin-film flexible circuits made with printed thin-film transistors (TFT) have been developed, they are inherently large and slow compared to silicon ICs. Beyond dozens or hundreds of transistors it is far more efficient to use traditional silicon wafer manufacturing technology…if the wafers can be repeatedly thinned down below 50 microns without damage.

Richard Chaney, general manager of American Semiconductor, presented on a “FleX Silicon-on-Polymer” approach that provides a replacement polymer substrate below <1 micron thin silicon to allow for handling and assembly. Processed silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers are front-side temporarily bonded to a “handle-wafer”, then back-side grinded to the buried oxide layer, then oxide chemically removed, and then an application-specific polymer is applied to the backside. After removing the FleX wafer from the handle-wafer, the polymer provides physical support for dicing and the rest of assembly.

For the last few years, the company has been doing R&D and limited pilot production by shipping lots of wafers through partner applications labs, but in the second-half of 2015 acquired a new manufacturing facility in Boise, ID. Process tools are being installed, and the first product dice are “FleX-OPA” operational amplifiers. Initial work was supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), but in the last 12-18 months the company has seen a major increase in sample requests and capability discussions from commercial companies.

Printed possibilities

Bob Street of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) presented on “Printed hybrid arrays for health monitoring.” There are of course fundamentally different sensor needs for different applications, and PARC is working on many thin-film transducers and circuits:

Gas sensing – outer environment or human breath,

Optical sensing – monitoring body signals such as blood oxygen,

Electrochemical sensing – detect specific enzymes, and

Pressure/Accelerometers – extreme physical conditions such as head concussions

“There are many and various ways that you can do health monitoring,” explained Street. “There will be sensors, and local electronics with amplifiers and logic and switches. One of the prime features of printing is that it is a versatile system for depositing different materials.”

PARC has built an amazing printing system for R&D that includes different functional dispense heads for ink-jet, aerosol, and extrusion so that a wide varieties of viscosities can be handled. The system also include integrated UV-cure capability. Printing tends to have the right spatial resolution on the scale of 50-100 microns for the target applications spaces.

PARC worked on an early system to monitor for head concussions and store event information. They used printed PVDF material to print accelerometers and pressure sensors, as well as ferroelectric analog memory. Various commercially available materials are used to print organic thin-film transistors (OTFT) for digital logic. For complementary digital logic, different metals would conventionally be needed for contacts to the n-type and p-type TFTs, but PARC found an additive layer that could be applied to one type such that a single metal could be used for both.

A gas sensor prototype that can can detect 100-1000ppm of carbon-monoxide was printed using carbon nano-tubes (CNT) as load resistors. They printed a 4-stage complementary inverter to provide gain, using 7 different materials. “This is a case where a very simple device uses many layers,” explained Street. “Four drops of one materials does it, so you wouldn’t look at using a subtractive process for this.”

Rigid/flex integration

Dr. Azar Alizadeh, GE Global Rsearch, presented on “Manufacturing of wearable sensors for human health & performance monitoring.” Wearables in healthcare applications include medical, high exertion, occupational, and wellness/fitness. The Figure shows a flexible blood pressure-sensor that measures from a finger-tip. Future flexible devices are expected to provide more nuanced biometric information to enable personalized medicine, but any commercially viable disposable device will have to cost <$10 to drive widespread adoption. Costs must be limited because just in the US alone the annual amount spent to serve ~50M patients in hospitals is >$880B.

Finger-tip optical blood-pressure sensor created with printed photodetector by GE Corp.

Finger-tip optical blood-pressure sensor created with printed photodetector by GE Corp.

Shipment area of wide color gamut (WCG)  displays is expected to reach 32 million square meters in 2018, which represents 17 percent of total display shipment area, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS),the leading global source of critical information and insight. WCG displays include organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and quantum dot technologies.

“As competition in the display market intensifies, display and TV manufacturers are looking for new and emerging technologies to differentiate their offerings from competitors and to provide consumers with higher screen resolution,” said Richard Son, senior analyst, IHS Technology. “WCG technologies are therefore becoming more popular.”

There are two different kinds of quantum dot materials. One is cadmium-included quantum dot and the other is cadmium-free (Cd-free) quantum dot. Since cadmium is an unsafe and toxic element, the display industry developed Cd-free quantum dot technology to replace it. Cd-free quantum dot displays are forecast to comprise 80 percent of the total quantum dot display market in 2016. Quantum dot is just beginning to be used in TV displays to compete against OLED displays. Active-matrix-OLED (AMOLED), by comparison, is primarily used in smartphone displays.

OLED WCG display shipment area is forecast to reach 4.4 million square meters in 2016, growing to 9.2 million square meters in 2018. Quantum-dot WCG display shipment area will reach 13.4 million square meters in 2018, rising from 6.1 million square meters in 2016.

wide color gamut

By Paula Doe, SEMI

The changing market for ICs means the end of business as usual for the greater semiconductor supply chain. Smarter use of data analytics looks like a key strategy to get new products more quickly into high yield production at improved margins.

Emerging IoT market drives change in manufacturing

The emerging IoT market for pervasive intelligence everywhere may be a volume driver for the industry, but it will also put tremendous pressure on prices that drive change in manufacturing. Pressure to keep ASPs of multichip connected devices below $1 to $5 for many IoT low-to-mid end applications, will drive more integration of the value chain, and more varied elements on the die. “The value chain must evolve to be more effective and efficient to meet the price and cost pressures for such IoT products and applications,” suggests Rajeev Rajan, VP of IoT, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, who will speak on the issue in a day-long forum on the future of smart manufacturing in the semiconductor supply chain at SEMICON West 2016 on July 14.

“It also means tighter and more complete integration of features on the die that enable differentiating capabilities at the semiconductor level, and also fewer, smaller devices that reduce the overall Bill of Materials (BOM), and result in more die per wafer.” He notes that at 22nm GLOBALFOUNDRIES is looking to enable an integrated connectivity solution instead of a separate die or external chip. Additional requirements for IoT are considerations for integrating security at the lower semiconductor/hardware layers, along with the typical higher layer middleware and software layers.

This drive for integration will also mean demand for new advanced packaging solutions that deliver smaller, thinner, and simpler form factors. The cost pressure also means than the next nodes will have to offer tangible power/performance/area/cost (PPAC) value, without being too disruptive a transition from the current reference flow. “Getting to volume yields faster will involve getting yield numbers earlier in the process, with increasing proof-points and planning iterations up front with customers, at times tied to specific use-cases and IoT market sub-segments,” he notes.

Rapid development of affordable data tools from other industries may help

Luckily, the wide deployment of affordable sensors and data analysis tools in other industries in other industries is developing solutions that may help the IC sector as well.  “A key trend is the “democratization” – enabling users to do very meaningful learning on data, using statistical techniques, without requiring a Ph.D. in statistics or mathematics,” notes Bill Jacobs, director, Advanced Analytics Product Management, Microsoft Corporation, another speaker in the program. “Rapid growth of statistics-oriented languages like R across industries is making it easier for manufacturers and equipment suppliers to capture, visualize and learn from data, and then build those learnings into dashboards for rapid deployment, or build them directly into automated applications and in some cases, machines themselves.”

Intel has reported using commercially available systems such as Cloudera, Aquafold, and Revolution Analytics (now part of Microsoft) to combine, store, analyze and display results from a wide variety of structured and unstructured manufacturing data. The system has been put to work to determine ball grid placement accuracy from machine learning from automatic comparison of thousands of images to select the any that deviate from the known-good pattern,  far more efficiently than human inspectors, and also to analyze tester parametrics to predict 90% of potential failures of the test interface unit before they happen.

“The IC industry may be ahead in the masses of data it gathers, but other industries are driving the methodology for easy management of the data,” he contends. “There’s a lot that can be leveraged from other industries to improve product quality, supply chain operations, and line up-time in the semiconductor industry.”

Demands for faster development of more complex devices require new approaches

As the cost of developing faster, smaller, lower power components gets ever higher, the dual sourcing strategies of automotive and other big IC users puts even more pressure on device makers to get the product right the first time. “There’s no longer time to learn with iterations to gradually improve the yield over time, now we need to figure out how to do this faster, as well as how to counter higher R&D costs on lower margins,” notes Sia Langrudi, Siemens VP Worldwide Strategy and Business Development,   who will also speak in the program.

The first steps are to recognize the poor visibility and traceability from design to manufacturing, and to put organizational discipline into place to remove barriers between silos. Then a company needs good baseline data, to be able to see improvement when it happens. “It’s rather like being an alcoholic, the first step is to recognize you have a problem,” says Langrudi. “People tell me they already have a quality management system, but they don’t. They have lots of different information systems, and unless they are capturing the information all in one place, the opportunity to use it is not there.”

Other speakers discussing these issues in the Smart Manufacturing Forum at SEMICON West July 14 include Amkor SVP Package Products Robert Lanzone, Applied Materials VP New Markets & Services Chris Moran, Intel VP IoT/GM Industrial Anthony Neal Graves, NextNine US Sales Manager Don Harroll, Optimal+ VP WW Marketing David Park, Qualcomm SVP Engineering Michael Campbell, Rudolph Technologies VP/GM Software Thomas Sonderman, and Samsung Sr Director, Engineering Development, Austin, Ben Eynon.

Learn more about the speakers at the SEMICON West 2016 session “Smart Manufacturing: The Key Opportunities and Challenges of the Next Generation of Manufacturing for the Electronics Value Chain.” To see all sessions in the Extended Supply Chain Forum, click here.

The CEA (Atomic Energy Commission) and Intel are boosting their collaboration through a new R & D agreement signed in Paris on Thursday 12 May. This collaboration, extended to several key areas in digital technology, will enable the two sides to develop a shared R&D program and jointly submit research and innovation projects on a European scale, particularly as regards High Performance Computing (HPC), as part of the Horizon 2020 programme.

The new CEA-Intel agreement involves several strategic research programmes with the teams of the CEA’s Leti Institute in Grenoble, including the Internet of Things, high-speed wireless communication, security technologies and 3D displays. It also means that the two companies will work together to jointly submit projects to Europe’s biggest innovation and research programme, Horizon 2020.

This agreement, concluded for a minimum of five years, concerns the current development of digital technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT), including:

  • The development of new materials in order to further the miniaturisation and adaptability of electronic components used in mobile phones. The nature of these components and their layout are crucially important to the system’s performance, size and cost.
  • The development of wireless communication systems and faster exchanges,
  • The integration of connected objects and the study of low-consumption communication technologies.

After the signature of the agreement in Paris, the director of the CEA’s Leti Institute, Marie-Noelle Semeria, said, “The CEA and Intel have a long history of shared technological development in high-performance computing. This collaboration marks the recognition of the CEA-Leti as one of Europe’s most innovative players in the IoT and the basic technologies of Cloud computing and Big Data. It also increases the attractiveness of the Grenoble Valley in terms of microelectronics.”

According to vice president of the Data Center Group and general manager of the Enterprise and HPC Platform Group Raj Hazra, said, “This announcement expands upon our long standing high performance computing relationship with CEA to drive leading edge innovation in IoT, wireless, and security in the European community.  We look forward to the important innovations and discoveries to come from this collaboration.”

AMD today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Board member John Caldwell as Chairman. Caldwell succeeds Bruce Claflin as Chairman of the Board. Claflin has been Chairman of the Board since March 2009 and will continue to serve as an AMD Board member.

“I am honored to be named chairman of AMD’s Board,” said John Caldwell. “It is an exciting time to be part of AMD as we execute on our transformative strategy — bringing innovative products to market and delivering increased value to our shareholders. On behalf of our Board of Directors, I would like to recognize Bruce Claflin for his leadership and for his continuing contribution to our company.”

Caldwell joined AMD’s Board in 2006 and has held a variety of Committee positions including most recently Compensation and Leadership Resources Committee Chair and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee membership. Caldwell brings extensive board and executive level experience. In his career, he has served as a CEO of three technology companies and been on the board of seven public technology companies.

FlexTech, a SEMI Strategic Association Partner, today announced the formal completion of three flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) R&D projects under its U.S. Army Research Laboratory  (ARL) technology investment agreement.  The completed projects are with ENrG for a flexible ceramic substrate; nScrypt and NovaCentrix for a next-generation three-dimensional (3D) printing tool for creating complex and functional objects; and PARC, a Xerox company, for a flexible sensor platform. Projects ranged from 12-18 months and were managed by a member of the FlexTech Technical Council, which is a team of experts in flexible, hybrid and printed electronics technologies.

  • ENrG, located in Buffalo, New York, completed a 15 month project to develop a high-yield process to create a 20 micron thick, flexible ceramic substrate capable of retaining its integrity when drilled, cut, rolled and processed at high temperatures. During the project, ENrG developed processes to print thin-film lithium batteries, circuits, application of copper cladding and other metallization with excellent performance characteristics. The project, valued at $570,000 total, was 56% cost shared by the company.
  • nScrypt, based in Orlando, Florida, in partnership with NovaCentrix of Austin, Texas, developed a 3D printer for rapid prototyping of new electronic devices. The total award of $1,291,000 was cost-shared by nScrpyt, NovaCentrix and FlexTech and it was completed over a 16-month period. The new tool additively builds integrated hybrid circuits on 3D surfaces, as well as devices on flexible, low temperature, and rigid planar substrates. It integrates processing of three previously-separate tools. The first tool has been installed at ARL. Commercial tools are available from nScrypt.
  • PARC, a Xerox Company, Palo Alto, California, developed a passively powered, digitally-fabricated, communication-enabled, flexible sensor platform that is easily customizable to multiple sensor types. The project addressed the availability of an end-to-end system design that can be manufactured in large quantities with digital printing for smart tag or wearable applications. In its final report, the PARC researchers noted several key areas where additional development would be helpful, including components designed specifically to be compatible with flexible, printed sensor systems. Total cost was $409,000 and shared equally between PARC and FlexTech.

“Each of these projects, chosen and supported by the Technical Council, moves the needle on learning how to fabricate electronics on flexible substrates,” stated Michael Ciesinski, president of FlexTech. “Especially impressive is the teaming on the projects, which helps build out the FHE supply chain.”

FlexTech, a SEMI Strategic Association Partner, is focused on growth, profitability, and success throughout the manufacturing and distribution chain of flexible hybrid electronics, by developing solutions for advancing these technologies from R&D to commercialization. Learn more at www.nscrypt.com, www.novacentrix.com, www.enrg-inc.com, www.parc.com

For more information, visit www.semi.org

Research published in the journals Materials Today Communications and Scientific Reports has described how silver nanowires are proving to be the ideal material for flexible, touch-screen technologies while also exploring how the material can be manipulated to tune its performance for other applications. Currently, touch screen devices mainly rely on electrodes made from indium tin oxide (ITO), a material that is expensive to source, expensive to process and very brittle.

A team from the University of Surrey, led by Professor Alan Dalton and in collaboration with M-SOLV Ltd, a touch-sensor manufacturer based in Oxford, looked to alternative materials to overcome the challenges of ITO, which is suffering from supply uncertainty. Alternative materials investigated as ITO replacements have included graphene, carbon nanotubes and random metal nanowire films. This study showed how silver nanowire films have emerged as the strongest competitor, due to transmittances and conductivities which can match and readily exceed those of ITO. This is a material that consists of wires which are over a thousand times thinner than a human hair, that form an interconnected conductive network.

Matthew Large, the first author on the research published in Scientific Reports described the importance of these latest results. “Our research hasn’t just identified silver nanowires as a viable replacement touchscreen material, but has gone one step further in showing how a process called ‘ultrasonication’ can allow us to tailor performance capabilities. By applying high frequency sound energy to the material we can manipulate how long the nanosized ‘rods’ of silver are. This allows us to tune how transparent or how conductive our films are, which is vital for optimising these materials for future technologies like flexible solar cells and roll-able electronic displays.”

In a paper published last month in Materials Today Communications, the same team, showed how silver nanowires can be processed using the same laser ablation technique commonly used to manufacture ITO devices. Using this technique, the team produced a fully operating five inch multi-touch sensor, identical to those typically used in smartphone technology. They found it performed comparably to one based on ITO but used significantly less energy to produce.

“Not only does this flexible material perform very well, we have shown that it is a viable alternative to ITO in practical devices,” concluded Professor Dalton. “The fact we are able to produce devices using similar methods as currently in use, but in a less energy-intensive way is an exciting step towards flexible gadgets that do not just open the door for new applications, but do so in a much greener way.”

Maria Cann, a technologist from M-SOLV and first author on the Materials Today Communications paper added “”We are seeing a lot of interest from our customers in silver nanowire films as an ITO replacement in devices. This work is a really important step in establishing exactly which sensor designs can make good nanowire products. The fact that the nanowire films are processed by the same laser techniques as ITO makes the transition from ITO to nanowires really straightforward. It won’t be long before we are all using nanowires in our electronic devices. ”

The team, now based at the University of Sussex is now looking to develop the scalability of the process to make it more industrially viable. One limiting factor is the current cost of silver nanowires. Funded by Innovate UK and EPSRC, the team are collaborating with M-SOLV and a graphene supplier Thomas Swan to use a nanowire and graphene combination in the electrodes to markedly reduce the cost.

Melissa Grupen-Shemansky, Ph.D.

Melissa Grupen-Shemansky, Ph.D.

SEMI today announced the appointment of Melissa Grupen-Shemansky, Ph.D., as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the FlexTech Group and for SEMI’s Advanced Packaging program. With over 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, Grupen-Shemansky has a strong background in R&D, manufacturing, business development, and technology strategy. She will oversee FlexTech’s flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) and Nano-Bio Manufacturing Consortium (NBMC) R&D programs and technology advisory councils. Grupen-Shemansky will also serve as technical advisor to SEMI’s Advanced Packaging initiative and as technical liaison to NextFlex, the Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute, awarded to FlexTech in August 2015.

“Dr. Grupen-Shemansky’s experience in the IC industry, specifically with advanced packaging and managing R&D programs, is tremendously valuable to SEMI members,” states Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. “With the convergence of technologies and the broadening of microelectronic applications, Melissa will ensure that we are serving our industry’s needs, as well as identifying technology trends and inflections. We are delighted to have someone of her caliber join our team.”

“The FlexTech and NBMC R&D programs are providing the means to help build the FHE supply chain, while bringing multiple stakeholders together to create early stage project demonstrators,” notes Michael Ciesinski, president of the FlexTech Group within SEMI. “Melissa will provide very capable leadership of these programs, contribute to SEMI’s global packaging strategy, and coordinate technology development with NextFlex.”

Starting her career at Motorola in semiconductor research and development, Grupen-Shemansky held various management positions over ten years ─ in silicon and gallium arsenide device fabrication, packaging, interconnect and system integration. Following Motorola, she was the director of Interconnect Technology and Design Engineering at Lucent, Bell Labs (Agere Systems), vice president of Packaging and Design at Spansion, and senior vice president of Engineering in Advanced Nanotechnology Solutions, a startup in 3D and cybersecurity.

Grupen-Shemansky has received various corporate and educational awards, has seven issued patents, numerous technical publications, and is a contributing author to Failure-Free Integrated Circuit Packages. With bachelor and master degrees in Chemical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, she also holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Arizona State University.

“I am very excited to join the SEMI team that, for over 40 years, has provided important business and technical services to the microelectronics supply chain,” notes Dr. Grupen-Shemansky. “The recent addition of FlexTech broadens SEMI’s role to technology development and manufacturing initiatives. To date, the FlexTech Group has enabled and funded essential flexible hybrid electronic innovations and I intend to continue that effort focusing on technology gaps in the ecosystem.”

One secret to creating the world’s fastest silicon-based flexible transistors: a very, very tiny knife.

Working in collaboration with colleagues around the country, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have pioneered a unique method that could allow manufacturers to easily and cheaply fabricate high-performance transistors with wireless capabilities on huge rolls of flexible plastic.

The researchers — led by Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma, the Lynn H. Matthias Professor in Engineering and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in electrical and computer engineering, and research scientist Jung-Hun Seo — fabricated a transistor that operates at a record 38 gigahertz, though their simulations show it could be capable of operating at a mind-boggling 110 gigahertz. In computing, that translates to lightning-fast processor speeds.

It’s also very useful in wireless applications. The transistor can transmit data or transfer power wirelessly, a capability that could unlock advances in a whole host of applications ranging from wearable electronics to sensors.

The team published details of its advance April 20 in the journal Scientific Reports.

The researchers’ nanoscale fabrication method upends conventional lithographic approaches — which use light and chemicals to pattern flexible transistors — overcoming such limitations as light diffraction, imprecision that leads to short circuits of different contacts, and the need to fabricate the circuitry in multiple passes.

Using low-temperature processes, Ma, Seo and their colleagues patterned the circuitry on their flexible transistor — single-crystalline silicon ultimately placed on a polyethylene terephthalate (more commonly known as PET) substrate — drawing on a simple, low-cost process called nanoimprint lithography.

In a method called selective doping, researchers introduce impurities into materials in precise locations to enhance their properties — in this case, electrical conductivity. But sometimes the dopant merges into areas of the material it shouldn’t, causing what is known as the short channel effect. However, the UW-Madison researchers took an unconventional approach: They blanketed their single crystalline silicon with a dopant, rather than selectively doping it.

Then, they added a light-sensitive material, or photoresist layer, and used a technique called electron-beam lithography — which uses a focused beam of electrons to create shapes as narrow as 10 nanometers wide — on the photoresist to create a reusable mold of the nanoscale patterns they desired. They applied the mold to an ultrathin, very flexible silicon membrane to create a photoresist pattern. Then they finished with a dry-etching process — essentially, a nanoscale knife — that cut precise, nanometer-scale trenches in the silicon following the patterns in the mold, and added wide gates, which function as switches, atop the trenches.

With a unique, three-dimensional current-flow pattern, the high performance transistor consumes less energy and operates more efficiently. And because the researchers’ method enables them to slice much narrower trenches than conventional fabrication processes can, it also could enable semiconductor manufacturers to squeeze an even greater number of transistors onto an electronic device.

Ultimately, says Ma, because the mold can be reused, the method could easily scale for use in a technology called roll-to-roll processing (think of a giant, patterned rolling pin moving across sheets of plastic the size of a tabletop), and that would allow semiconductor manufacturers to repeat their pattern and mass-fabricate many devices on a roll of flexible plastic.

“Nanoimprint lithography addresses future applications for flexible electronics,” says Ma, whose work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. “We don’t want to make them the way the semiconductor industry does now. Our step, which is most critical for roll-to-roll printing, is ready.”