Fabrication of Smart Systems on Flexible Substrates Enabled by Graphene Integration

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The marvelous chemical and physical properties of graphene and graphene related 2D materials make them as very promising candidates to enable the fabrication of new electronics products in the realm on More than Moore. The ideal combination of mechanical, chemical and electronics features could allow the development of integrated smart systems on flexible and foldable substrates to exploit in the pervasive applications related to IoT and wearable electronics.

In the framework of EC funded Graphene Flagship, together with our partners, we have developed a graphene based technological platform with many different components available that can be integrated to fabricate smart systems, as a sensor node in which many of the system functions can benefit from the graphene use. Graphene based chemical, bio, strain, temperature sensors have been developed, and graphene based material has been used for antennas, for communication, and energy harvesting and storage, while the high level functions, signal processing and radio chip, have been delegated to standard Si based technologies. Demonstrators have been fabricated using Si on flex and flex on flex approach. A manufacturing hybrid approach has been adopted also at component level and different techniques have been used, such as printing, lithography, CVD graphene, solution based graphene and so on, in order to tailor the right cost vs performance trade off.