Flexible Electronics for Security, Manufacturing, and Growth in the United States Summary of a Symposium (2013) / Chapter Skim
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Panel I: The Flexible Electronics Opportunity and Industry Challenges: Perspectives from Industry
Panel I: The Flexible Electronics Opportunity and Industry Challenges: Perspectives from Industry
Pages 29-48
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From page 29... ...
One of its functions is to convey the administration's priority areas to the federal agencies and to offer budgetary guidance on meeting these priorities. Another objective of OSTP is to promote interagency cooperation through a shared vision, which is "especially useful in a fiscally constrained environment, such as the one we have now, when we really do need to make one plus one equal three, or four." This shared vision involved not only manufacturing but also many other areas, including energy, climate, health, and space.
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From page 30... ...
The authors define an industrial commons as "engineering R&D, materials, standards, tools, equipment, scalable processes, components, and manufacturing competencies in platform technologies need to product cost-effective, safe and reliable products."
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From page 31... ...
Finally, the structural nonproduction costs are important, including taxes, benefits, energy, and pollution abatement costs. In accord with the goal of strengthening the industrial commons, he described his own work at OSTP to promote advanced manufacturing in terms of three areas: how to create new industries, how sustain and grow existing industries, and how to coordinate manufacturing better across the federal agencies.
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From page 32... ...
But without policy changes, he said, the "picture was somewhat scary." By this he meant the specter of "things invented here but manufactured elsewhere; industries we have already lost, and others that are at risk." Citing recent research by Gary Pisano and Willy Shih, he showed a list of technologies that had been lost to manufacturers abroad, including "fabless" chips, compact fluorescent bulbs, liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) for monitors, TVs, and mobile phones; lithium-ion, lithium polymer, and nickel–metal hydride batteries for cell phones, portable consumer electronics, laptops, and power tools; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells; desktop, notebook, and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard disk drives; consumer-networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top
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From page 33... ...
Partnerships could affect multiple sectors, he said, and take the form of horizontal consortia, or vertical consortia, as in the case of SEMATECH, or a hybrid. They could also leverage existing research from universities to new clusters, such as the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University.
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From page 34... ...
In hardware, a chief area of focus was large-area electronics, which included flexible electronics. Several other PARC topics also related to flexible electronics, including microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS; optoelectronics, including activities in laser devices and optical detectors; printing systems, which grew out of the Xerox tradition; biomedical systems; and clean technology, including energy systems.
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From page 35... ...
He showed an image from the University of Washington of electronic devices embedded in a contact lens. "Systems on a foil," he said, would include wearable, flexible devices that were "designed for people, not imposed upon them." A second category, he said, was one that needs the flexible substrates for particular uses but also bring benefits to manufacturing as a whole.
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From page 36... ...
Its first approach was to make standard technologies flexible, such as the placement of amorphous silicon on plastic and polycrystalline silicon on thin steel foils. They had also spent a good deal of time exploiting printing technology, especially ink-jet printing, and were now beginning to look into traditional printing technologies, such as gravure.
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From page 37... ...
He said that PARC had been able to develop some sensing from laminated elements that could potentially be produced inexpensively through roll-to-roll techniques. "The next step," he said, "is to integrate these so the impact measured by the MEMS sensor is amplified by the printed amplifiers and then stored in printed memory cells." This experience, he said, had confirmed PARC's view that flexible sensor systems would be important not only for the military but for many applications, such as monitoring elderly people at home.
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From page 38... ...
But it would be interesting if we could put this together with applications, which you could argue is one of the big missing pieces in the United States." Dr. Bringans offered a quote from a report by NSF and Office of Naval Research on the state of flexible electronics: "…the relatively low prevalence of actual manufacturing and advanced systems research and development in the United States has led to an incomplete hybrid flexible electronics R&D scenario for this country…." "We think that by pushing the applications," he concluded, "we could really help kick-start this industry, which we all believe is going to be very important." IMPACT OF A FLEXIBLE FORM FACTOR FOR DISPLAYS AND LIGHTING Julie Brown Universal Display Corporation Dr.
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From page 39... ...
Brown said, beautiful products are being designed with electrophoretics, or e-ink, which produces a thin and potentially flexible technology. The goal is to advance this technology with a technology platform and manufacturing process that will add more essential features, including full color, vivid images, video rate display, and "green low power." These features can then be combined with the manufacturing capability to make "rollable and almost paper-like displays." She noted that the current generation of cell phones, such as the Galaxy S, already generates vivid color by combining flexible silicon backplanes with OLED front planes.
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From page 40... ...
Brown said that the company's core OLED technology sits on a flexible substrate about 100 microns thick and is rugged enough to absorb hammer blows. Development of the technology began in DARPA and moved into the Army, and UDC had been funded by the Army to build full-color, active-matrix OLED flexible displays.
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From page 41... ...
And today the technology blocks are in place: flexible encapsulation, low-power OLED, flexible substrate." A Need for Global Relationships Dr. Brown said that from both national and international perspectives, there is great momentum toward development of technology for flexible displays.
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From page 42... ...
Taussig, director of advanced display research for Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) , said that he had "a visceral reaction to the terms flexible electronics and flexible displays.
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From page 43... ...
The first was current reflective displays, which hold advantages in mobility applications, such as e-ink, which he called a "tremendous and exciting product. It uses incredibly low power, and you can see it in bright light." In two areas, he said,
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From page 44... ...
Taussig returned to the color reflective problem, saying that he had referred to "side-by-side color," in which a color filter is placed in front of a black-and-white light valve. This technique is fundamentally limited, he said, because it subtracts much of the available light.
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From page 45... ...
His firm had worked for years with a company called Power Film Solar to develop a one-third-meter-wide pilot line at the HP Palo Alto research facility, which makes the backplanes. The technology had been licensed to Power Film, which had formed a subsidiary called Phicot, Inc., a recipient of Army Research Laboratory funding, to make a self-powered, wrist-worn cuff display for the military.
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From page 46... ...
Dr. Brown said that she favored a new government initiative to help companies bring flexible OLED lighting, and perhaps flexible solar photovoltaics (PV)
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From page 47... ...
"Whether in solar energy, display, lighting, or other areas," she said, "I think we have a great opportunity to place the same emphasis as other countries, in flexible electronics, but working at product integration. There are lots of flexible substrate systems in the U.S.
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From page 48... ...
48 FLEXIBLE ELECTRONICS manufacturing. We should keep that model in mind, as well as more traditional consortium models."
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