Currently, metal-oxide TFTs is typically targeted for display backplanes. However, they are also ideally suited for next generation IoT products requiring low-cost, flexible and ultra-thin sensors and circuits. Over the past 10 years, imec has developed different TFT based IC design platform with a variety of functional blocks (wireless tags, memory, microprocessor, sensor interfaces and signage control) for IoT sensor platforms. Depending on the application and manufacturing requirements, the design platform may leverage different TFT technologies (e.g. organic, oxide, amorphous- and poly-silicon), and is compatible with foundry manufacturing.

 

In this talk, we will give an overview of imec's activities and roadmap in thin film electronics for sensors, displays, imagers and ultrasound transducers. We will present imec's work in flexible/hybrid IoT sensor platforms (health patches, smart labels, smart package, smart cards, etc.) based on metal oxide TFT technology. We will discuss the trade-offs of using this technology for IoT sensor applications and outlook for upscaling the manufacturing to meet demands for increasingly high volumes of IoT sensors. We will also discuss imec's work in thin film ASICs that can enable hardware customization at lower cost and manufacturing turn-around times as well as enable truly thin and flexible form factors.

Prashant Agrawal received PhD (Electrical Engineering) from KU Leuven (Belgium) in 2015 and MS (Computers Science & Engineering) from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He is currently the Program Manager for Thin Film Electronics at Imec Belgium. Prior to this, he had been Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Imec between 2015-18 during which he managed technical and business development activities, and fund raising for internal ventures. He worked as Senior R&D Engineer in the Hyperspectral Imaging Group at Imec (Belgium) between 2014-2015 and as Technical Staff Member in the HPC Group at IBM Research India between 2006-2009.

Imec is the world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. The combination of our widely acclaimed leadership in microchip technology and profound software and ICT expertise is what makes us unique. By leveraging our world-class infrastructure and local and global ecosystem of partners across a multitude of industries, we create groundbreaking innovation in application domains such as healthcare, smart cities and mobility, logistics and manufacturing, and energy. Imec is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium and also has distributed R&D groups at a number of Flemish universities, in the Netherlands, Taiwan, USA, China, and offices in India and Japan.