This paper presents the fabrication and characterization of a flexible, flat, miniaturized fluxgate sensor with a thin amorphous rectangular magnetic core fabricated by the pad/printing technique. Both the design and the various printing steps of the sensor are presented. The fluxgate sensor comprises of solenoid coils, and to the best of our knowledge, is the first to be printed with a conventional micro-printing technique. The magnetic core is a non-printed component, placed between the printed layers. The sensor’s linear measuring range is ±40 µT with 2% full-scale linearity error, at 100 kHz excitation frequency. The highest measured sensitivity reaches 14,620 V/T at 200 kHz, while the noise of the sensor was found to be 10 nT/ Hz at 1 Hz.

A flexible flat micro-Fluxgate sensor with amorphous rectangular core, fabricated using a simple printing technique is presented. All materials were selected to facilitate the fabrication process and to achieve optimal sensor performance. The device's response to an externally applied magnetic field has been studied. The linear measuring range of the sensor is approximately ±40 μT with a linearity error of <2% FS at 100 kHz excitation frequency, allowing the measurement of the terrestrial magnetic field. Experimental results demonstrate that the behaviour of the fabricated device corresponds to the behaviour of a Fluxgate sensor with high sensitivity.

The purpose of this paper is to present a newly developed process for the fabrication of multilayer circuits based on the pad-printing technique. Even though the maturity level, in terms of accuracy, substrate type and print size of several printing industrial processes is relatively high, the fabrication complexity of multilayer printed electronics remains relatively high. Due to its versatility, the pad-printing technique allows the superposition of printed conductive and insulating layers. Compared to other printing processes, its main advantage is the ability to print on various substrates even on flexible, curved or irregular surfaces. Silver-based inks were used for the formulation of conductive layers while UV inks were employed to fulfil the functionality of the insulating layers. To demonstrate the functionality of the pad-printing results, a multilayer test pattern has been designed and printed on Kapton®. Furthermore, to demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, a multilayer circuit composed of three stacked layers has been designed and printed on various substrates including Kapton®, paper and wood. This electronic circuit controls an array of LEDs through the manipulation of a two-key capacitive touch sensor. This study, allowed us to define recommendations for the different parameters leading to high printing quality. We expect a long-term beneficial impact of this study towards a low-cost, fast, and environmental-friendly production of printed electronics.