• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.19-28
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• 2016

This paper presents an overview of selected advanced measurement technologies for the mechanical properties of polymers used for flexible and stretchable electronic packaging. Over the years, a variety of flexible and stretchable electronics have been developed due to their potential applications for next generation IT industry. To achieve more flexible and wearable devices for practical applications, the usage of polymeric components has been increased significantly. Therefore, accurate measurement of mechanical properties of the polymers is necessary in order to design mechanically reliable devices. However, the measurement has been challenging due to the soft nature and thin applications of polymers. Here, we describe novel measurement technologies of mechanical properties of polymers for flexible and stretchable electronics.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.1-9
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• 2013

Recently flexible electronic devices have attracted a great deal of attention because of new application possibilities including flexible display, flexible memory, flexible solar cell and flexible sensor. In particular, development of flexible memory is essential to complete the flexible integrated systems such as flexible smart phone and wearable computer. Research of flexible memory has primarily focused on organic-based materials. However, organic flexible memory has still several disadvantages, including lower electrical performance and long-term reliability. Therefore, emerging research in flexible electronics seeks to develop flexible and stretchable technologies that offer the high performance of conventional wafer-based devices as well as superior flexibility. Development of flexible memory with inorganic silicon materials is based on the design principle that any material, in sufficiently thin form, is flexible and bendable since the bending strain is directly proportional to thickness. This article reviews progress in recent technologies for flexible memory and flexible electronics with inorganic silicon materials, including transfer printing technology, wavy or serpentine interconnection structure for reducing strain, and wafer thinning technology.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.277.2-277.2
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• 2014

For next-generation electronic applications, human-machine interface devices have recently been demonstrated such as the wearable computer as well as the electronic skin (e-skin). For integration of those systems, it is essential to develop many kinds of components including displays, energy generators and sensors. In particular, flexible sensing devices to detect some stimuli like strain, pressure, light, temperature, gase and humidity have been investigated for last few decades. Among many condidates, a pressure sensing device based on organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) is one of interesting structure in flexible touch displays, bio-monitoring and e-skin because of their flexibility. In this study, we have investigated a flexible e-skin based on highly sensitive, pressure-responsive OFETs using microstructured ferroelectric gate dielectrics, which simulates both rapidly adapting (RA) and slowly adatping (SA) mechanoreceptors in human skin. In SA-type static pressure, furthermore, we also demonstrate that the FET array can detect thermal stimuli for thermoreception through decoupling of the input signals from simultaneously applied pressure. The microstructured highly crystalline poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) possessing piezoelectric-pyroelectric properties in OFETs allowed monitoring RA- and SA-mode responses in dyanamic and static pressurizing conditions, which enables to apply the e-skin to bio-monitoring of human and robotics.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.7-11
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• 2024

Soft-pressure sensors have numerous applications in soft robotics, biomedical devices, and wearable smart devices. Herein, we present a highly sensitive electronic skin device with an isotropic wrinkled pressure sensor. A conductive ink for soft pressure sensors is produced by a solution process using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), poly 3-hexylthiophene (P3HT), carbon black, and chloroform as the solvents. P3HT provides high reproducibility and conductivity by improving the ink dispersibility. The conductivity of the ink is optimized by adjusting the composition of the carbon black and PDMS. Soft lithography is used to fabricate a conductive elastic structure with an isotropic wrinkled structure. Two conductive elastic structures with an isotropic wrinkle structure is stacked to develop a pressure sensor, and it is confirmed that the isotropic wrinkle structure is more sensitive to pressure than when two elastic structures with an anisotropic wrinkle structure are overlapped. Specifically, the pressure sensor fabricated with an isotropic wrinkled structure can detect extremely low pressures (1.25 Pa). Additionally, the sensor has a high sensitivity of 15.547 kpa^-1 from 1.25 to 2500 Pa and a linear sensitivity of 5.15 kPa^-1 from 2500 Pa to 25 kPa.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.402-408
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• 2014

Heart rate is one of the most important signal to monitor the health condition of the patient or exerciser. Various wearable devices have been developed for the continuous monitoring of ECG signal from human body during exercise. Among these, ECG chest belt has been widely used. However wearing chest belt with ECG sensor is uncomfortable in normal life due to the electrode contact between metal electrodes of ECG sensor and skin of the human body. So we develop the royal healthcare backpack that can measure ECG signal without skin contact by using capacitor-type ECG sensor. The position of the measurement point is critical to collect a clear ECG signal in the capacitive ECG measurement from backpack. Various tests were conducted to find the optimal ECG measurement position which has less noise and could get strong and clear ECG signal during exercise, walking, hiking, mountain climbing and cycling.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2003.06a
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• pp.223-227
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• 2003

A new flexible electronic packaging technology and its medical applications are presented. Conventional silicon chips and electronic modules can be considered as "mechanically rigid box." which does not bend due to external forces. This mechanically rigid characteristic prohibits its applications to wearable systems or bio-implantable devices. Using current MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) technology. a surface micromachined flexible polysilicon sensor array and flexible electrode array fer neural interface were fabricated. A chemical thinning technique has been developed to realize flexible silicon chip. To combine these techniques will result in a realization of truly flexible sensing modules. which are suitable for many medical applications.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.261-261
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• 2007

Wearable and ubiquitous micro systems will be greatly growing and their related devices should be self-powered in order to avoid the replacement of finite power sources, for example, by scavenging energy from the environment. With ever reducing power requirements of both analog and digital circuits, power scavenging approaches are becoming increasingly realistic. One approach is to drive an electromechanical converter from ambient motion or vibration. Vibration-driven generators based on electromagnetic, electrostatic and piezoelectric technologies have been demonstrated. Among various generator types proposed so far, piezoelectric generator possesses considerable potential in micro system. To overcome low mechanical-to- electric energy conversion, the piezoelectric device should activate in resonance mode in response to external vibration. Normally, the external vibration excretes at low frequency ranging 0.1 to 200 Hz, whereas the resonant frequencies of the devices are fixed as constant. Therefore, keeping their resonant mode in varying external vibration can be one of important points in enhancing the conversion efficiency. We investigated the possibility of use of multi-bender type piezoelectric devices. To match the external vibration frequency with the device resonant frequency, the various devices with different resonant frequency were chosen. Under an external vibration acceleration of 0.1G at 120 Hz, the device exhibited a peak-to-peak voltage of 2.8 V and a power of 0.5 mw in resonance mode.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.15-20
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• 2012

In electronics industry, the coming electronic devices will be expected to be high integration and convergence electronics. And also, it will be expected that the coming electronics will be flexible, bendable and wearable electronics. Therefore, the demands and interests of bonding technology between flexible substrate and chip for mobile electronics, e-paper etc. have been increased because of weight and flexibility of flexible substrate. Considering fine pitch for high density and thermal damage of flexible substrate during bonding process, the micro solder bump technology for high density and low temperature bonding process for reducing thermal damage will be required. In this study, we researched on bonding technology of chip and flexible substrate by using 25um Cu pillar bumps and Sn-Bi solder bumps were formed by electroplating. From the our study, we suggest technology on Cu pillar bump formation, Sn-Bi solder bump formation, and bonding process of chip and flexible substrate for the coming electronics.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.263-274
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• 2016

The exceptional development of electronic device technology, the miniaturization of mobile devices, and the development of telecommunication technology has made it possible to monitor human biometric data anywhere and anytime by using different types of wearable or embedded sensors. In daily life, mobile devices can collect wireless body area network (WBAN) data, and the co-collected location data is also important for disease analysis. In order to efficiently analyze WBAN data, including location information and support medical analysis services, we propose a geohash-based spatial index method for a location-aware WBAN data monitoring system on the NoSQL database system, which uses an R-tree-based global tree to organize the real-time location data of a patient and a B-tree-based local tree to manage historical data. This type of spatial index method is a support cloud-based location-aware WBAN data monitoring system. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we built a system that can support a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Binary JSON (BSON) document data on mobile gateway devices. The proposed spatial index method can efficiently process location-based queries for medical signal monitoring. In order to evaluate our index method, we simulated a small system on MongoDB with our proposed index method, which is a document-based NoSQL database system, and evaluated its performance.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.566-579
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• 2012

Ubiquitous computing called pervasive one is based on the thought of pervading ability of computation in daily life applications. In other words, it aims to include computation in devices such as electronic equipment and automobiles. This has led to disengagement of computers from desktop form. Accordingly, the notice in ubiquitous computing being taken of a world steeped in remote and wireless computer-based-services. Handheld and wearable programmed devices such as sense and control appliances are such devices. This advancement is rapidly moving domestic tasks and life from device-and-human communication to the device-and-device model. This model called Machine to Machine (M2M) has led to acceleration of developments in sciences such as nano-science, bio-science, and information science. As a result, M2M led to appearance of applications in various fields such as, environment monitoring, agricultural, health care, logistics, and business. Since it is envisaged that M2M communications will play a big role in the future in all wireless applications and will be emerged as a progressive linkage for next-generation communications, this paper aims to consider how much M2M architectures can realize ubiquitous computing in daily life applications. This is carried out after acquainting and initiating readers with M2M architectures and arguments for M2M. Some of the applications was not achievable before but are becoming viable owing to emergence of M2M communications.