Ultra-thin chips for high-performance flexible electronics

Abstract

Flexible electronics has significantly advanced over the last few years, as devices and circuits from nanoscale structures to printed thin films have started to appear. Simultaneously, the demand for high-performance electronics has also increased because flexible and compact integrated circuits are needed to obtain fully flexible electronic systems. It is challenging to obtain flexible and compact integrated circuits as the silicon based CMOS electronics, which is currently the industry standard for high-performance, is planar and the brittle nature of silicon makes bendability difficult. For this reason, the ultra-thin chips from silicon is gaining interest. This review provides an in-depth analysis of various approaches for obtaining ultra-thin chips from rigid silicon wafer. The comprehensive study presented here includes analysis of ultra-thin chips properties such as the electrical, thermal, optical and mechanical properties, stress modelling, and packaging techniques. The underpinning advances in areas such as sensing, computing, data storage, and energy have been discussed along with several emerging applications (e.g., wearable systems, m-Health, smart cities and Internet of Things etc.) they will enable. This paper is targeted to the readers working in the field of integrated circuits on thin and bendable silicon; but it can be of broad interest to everyone working in the field of flexible electronics.

E-Skin: From Humanoids to Humans [Point of View]

“…tactile skin, e-Skin, flexible electronics etc.). Further, due to reduced package volume and lower parasitic capacitance, they have better high-frequency performances, lower power consumption and stable electronic response for a particular bending state [28]. They hold the potential to open up new avenues for heterogeneous integration of various semiconductor materials (e.g.…”

Monolayer MoSe₂-Based Tunneling Field Effect Transistor for Ultrasensitive Strain Sensing

“…Through innovative methods such as wafer or chip thinning [6] and ultra-thin electronic layers by printing Si nanowires [7], [8], there has been few attempts to overcome the above issues. However, the handling of delicate ultra-thin chips and large scale uniform printing of Si based electronic layers are still challenging tasks [9]. Meanwhile, 2D materials have emerged as potential alternatives as they offer excellent properties such as atomically thin layered structure, absence of This work is supported in part by the British Council and Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) through Newton-Bhabha Mobility scheme and by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through Engineering Fellowship for Growth (EP/R029644/1) and Heteroprint Programme Grant (EP/R03480X/1).…”

ZnO Nanowires-Based Flexible UV Photodetector System for Wearable Dosimetry

“…There is a growing interest in wearable healthcare systems such as wearable pads and wrist-bands [1][2][3], for measurement of heart rate, blood pressure, electrocardiogram, sweat pH, respiration rate, etc. [4][5][6][7][8] The field has opened several new application opportunities and is a major driver advancing the current rigid electronics towards the one with flexible and conformable form factors [9,10]. For example, tattoo like sensing patches with several sensors and electronic components have been developed on flexible/stretchable substrates to allow conformal contact with the curvy surfaces of human body and thus to have reliable measurement of the physiological parameters [4,9,[11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…[4][5][6][7][8] The field has opened several new application opportunities and is a major driver advancing the current rigid electronics towards the one with flexible and conformable form factors [9,10]. For example, tattoo like sensing patches with several sensors and electronic components have been developed on flexible/stretchable substrates to allow conformal contact with the curvy surfaces of human body and thus to have reliable measurement of the physiological parameters [4,9,[11][12][13][14][15]. Likewise, large-area robotic tactile sensing and corresponding electronics/interconnects have been developed on flexible substrates [13,14,16].…”