NextFlex News – July 2022

Dear Members and Friends,

The past week was dominated by the FLEX conference collocated with SEMICON West. Several colleagues attended, including recent hires, for whom this was an excellent introduction to the latest developments in FHE. Dr. Alex Cook presented on our reliability project, which delivered major advances this year, enabling over 90% yield on several first manufacturing runs in his talk “Reliably Flexible Hybrid Electronics.” Robert McManus discussed wearables and textile integration in the framework of the MDO Platoon projects. His talk was titled “Smart and Flexible: Enabling Smarter Textiles with Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE).” Jeff Bergman’s talk, titled “Manufacturing of a Flexible Hybrid Electronic Tag for Asset Monitoring,” focused on the machinery monitoring asset tag and discussed aspects of managing design, manufacturing yield and encapsulation. In his talk, “Flexible Hybrid Electronics for System Level Electronics Integration and Packaging,” Dr. Janos Veres (at left) presented on FHE as a tool with examples from the NextFlex ecosystem as well as internal projects. Nick Morris focused on Project Calls, Roadmaps and Member collaboration in his talk titled “Key Opportunities in Flexible Hybrid Electronics: NextFlex Mtg Roadmap.”

We loved all the discussions with and talks from NextFlex members during FLEX conference, and I am looking forward to speaking with even more of you during Innovation Days in two weeks’ time. We will have 50 FHE-enabled demonstrators staffed by members who will display their latest innovations. NextFlex engineers will be showing some of our newest technologies, including a machinery monitoring tag that streams vibration data to a computer and visualizes the response.

If you are not a member or cannot attend Innovation Days in person, be sure to visit our website after the event for access to some of the content shown.

Thank you for your continued support and interest in NextFlex.

Sincerely,

Malcolm J. Thompson, Ph.D.