ATLASS project, funded by the European Commission wants to push forward the printed organic electronics on flexible substrate through a major technology jump driving the size of printed circuits, transistors and thus sensors to smaller scales, towards micro and nano scale, still with high performance and high definition.
ATLASS takes this huge step by bringing high resolution technologies to the printing industries for the demonstration of products in high impact markets.
Printed organic electronics require new multifunctional high-performing inks (semiconductor mobility >1cm2/Vs, dielectrics, ferroelectrics) and high-resolution (down to 500nm and ~100nm thickness) and go through specific Roll-to-Roll and Sheet-to-Sheet printing processe, including nano-imprinting and gravure printing.
These specific printing processes are being engineered and scaled-up on pre-industrial lines across Europe, and will seek to produce high performance devices (speed ~ 10 MHz).
In order to ensure high quality and high yield in the production process, in-line control and novel automatic optical inspection tools and methodologies are being studied and be installed to ramp-up the yield of developed processes (>99%). It will enable a production in broader quantities, and thus diminish the fabrication cost of advanced circuits (>1000 transistors, 50 kHz clock rate).
The technology capability is benchmarked with conventional organic electronics process and will be demonstrated with four applications in the field of Interactive objects and Sensing surfaces :
- A temperature tag for food packaging should be able to display the current temperature of the conditioning, showing the food is kept in non degraded condition
- Electronics labelling for logistics will help track packages and objects in warehouses
- Force sensing foils will help improve the crash test measurments in automotive safety design
- Proximity or touch sensing for human-robot will help improve cobotics and interaction in industrial or daily-life applications.
The main objectives of the project are to :
- identify new inks and ferroelectric fluoropolymer in order to improve teh quality and purity of the materials, thus improving the reproducitibility of the fabrication (stability, reliability) and increase the produced volumes
- lower the size of printed features of electronics through roll-to-roll and sheet-to-sheet printing processes
- improve the circuit yield and quality and lower the defectivity by improving the optical inspection tools
- improve the self-aligniment techniques during the process of building up and printing the transistors
- demonstrate large area printed sensors, typically integrated in a passive-matrix front-plane with obvious limitations – that will profit from the combination with the ATLASS high-performance OTFT active-matrix backplanes in terms of unambiguous pixel addressing, fast switching, crosstalk reduction and high signal-to-noise ratio level (>10dB).
