Flexible electronics, also known as flex circuits, is a technology for assembling electronic circuits by mounting electronic devices on flexible plastic substrates, such as polyimide, PEEK or transparent conductive polyester film. Additionally, flex circuits can be screen printed silver circuits on polyester. Flexible electronic assemblies may be manufactured using identical components used for rigid printed circuit boards, allowing the board to conform to a desired shape, or to flex during its use.
Eli Yablonovitch is an American physicist and engineer who, along with Sajeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. In addition to pioneering photonic crystals, he was the first to recognize that a strained quantum-well laser has a significantly reduced threshold current compared to its unstrained counterpart. This is now employed in the majority of semiconductor lasers fabricated throughout the world. His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.
Claire Jennifer Tomlin is a British researcher in hybrid systems, distributed and decentralized optimization and control theory and holds the Charles A. Desoer Chair at the University of California, at Berkeley.
Printed electronics is a set of printing methods used to create electrical devices on various substrates. Printing typically uses common printing equipment suitable for defining patterns on material, such as screen printing, flexography, gravure, offset lithography, and inkjet. By electronic-industry standards, these are low-cost processes. Electrically functional electronic or optical inks are deposited on the substrate, creating active or passive devices, such as thin film transistors; capacitors; coils; resistors. Some researchers expect printed electronics to facilitate widespread, very low-cost, low-performance electronics for applications such as flexible displays, smart labels, decorative and animated posters, and active clothing that do not require high performance.
Stretchable electronics, also known as elastic electronics or elastic circuits, is a group of technologies for building electronic circuits by depositing or embedding electronic devices and circuits onto stretchable substrates such as silicones or polyurethanes, to make a completed circuit that can experience large strains without failure. In the simplest case, stretchable electronics can be made by using the same components used for rigid printed circuit boards, with the rigid substrate cut to enable in-plane stretchability. However, many researchers have also sought intrinsically stretchable conductors, such as liquid metals.
David Ethan Culler is a computer scientist and former chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a principal investigator in the Software Defined Buildings (SDB) project at the EECS Department at Berkeley and the faculty director of the i4Energy Center. His research addresses networks of small, embedded wireless devices, planetary-scale internet services, parallel computer architecture, parallel programming languages, and high performance communication. This includes TinyOS, Berkeley Motes, PlanetLab, Networks of Workstations (NOW), Internet services, Active Message, Split-C, and the Threaded Abstract Machine (TAM).
Richard Stephen Muller is an American professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley.
Electronic skin refers to flexible, stretchable and self-healing electronics that are able to mimic functionalities of human or animal skin. The broad class of materials often contain sensing abilities that are intended to reproduce the capabilities of human skin to respond to environmental factors such as changes in heat and pressure.
Flexible batteries are batteries, both primary and secondary, that are designed to be conformal and flexible, unlike traditional rigid ones. They can maintain their characteristic shape even against continual bending or twisting. The increasing interest in portable and flexible electronics has led to the development of flexible batteries which can be implemented in products such as smart cards, wearable electronics, novelty packaging, flexible displays and transdermal drug delivery patches. The advantages of flexible batteries are their conformability, light weight, and portability, which makes them easy to be implemented in products such as flexible and wearable electronics. Hence efforts are underway to make different flexible power sources including primary and rechargeable batteries with high energy density and good flexibility.
A conductive elastomer is a form of elastomer, often natural rubber or other rubber substitute, that is manufactured to conduct electricity. This is commonly accomplished by distributing carbon or other conductive particles throughout the raw material prior to setting it. Carbon black and silica are common additives to induce conductivity in elastomers. Silica has been studied more so than other additives due to its low cost however, its conductance is also lower. These additives can not only enable conductance but can increase the mechanical properties of the elastomer.
Soft robotics is a subfield of robotics that concerns the design, control, and fabrication of robots composed of compliant materials, instead of rigid links. In contrast to rigid-bodied robots built from metals, ceramics and hard plastics, the compliance of soft robots can improve their safety when working in close contact with humans.
Albert P. Pisano is an American academic. He serves as dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego, a position he has held since September 2013. Pisano publishes a monthly Dean's column that introduces the monthly news email from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. The January 2022 dean's column, "Math matters to all of us" triggered significant conversation on Pisano's LinkedIn feed.
Azita Emami-Neyestanak is the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at Caltech. Emami works on low-power mixed-mode circuits in scalable technologies. She is Executive Officer of the Department of Electrical Engineering and an investigator in the Heritage Medical Research Institute.
Tsu-Jae King Liu is an American academic and engineer who serves as the Dean and the Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering.
Roya Maboudian is distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center. She also holds The John F. Heil, Jr. Chancellor's Chair in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and is the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Affairs in the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. She has served as editor of the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems and ACS Sensors, and as associate editor of IEEE/SPIE Journal on Microfabrication, Microlithography and Microsystems.
Costas J. Spanos is the Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley. He is also the CEO of the Berkeley Educational Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS) and the Andrew S. Grove Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley.
Paul R. Berger is a professor in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University and physics, and a distinguished visiting professor (Docent) at Tampere University in Finland, recognized for his work on self-assembled quantum dots under strained-layer epitaxy, quantum tunneling based semiconductor devices and solution processable flexible electronics.
Christine Luscombe is a Japanese-British chemist who is a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Her research investigates polymer chemistry, organic electronics, organic photovoltaics and the synthesis of novel materials for processable electronics. She serves on the editorial boards of Macromolecules, Advanced Functional Materials, the Annual Review of Materials Research and ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Wei Gao is a Chinese-American biomedical engineer who currently serves as a professor of medical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Gao has been a professor at Caltech since 2017 and is an associate editor of the journals Science Advances, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, npj Flexible Electronics (Nature), Journal on Flexible Electronics (IEEE), and Sensors & Diagnosis.
Duygu Kuzum is a Turkish-American electrical engineer who is a professor at the University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. She develops transparent neural sensors based on single-layer materials. She was awarded a National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award in 2020.
