Novel lamination and interconnection technologies demonstrated in a flexible modular optical sensor array for wound monitoring

Flexible electronics is an emerging technology with all-printed cost effective, smart electronic products that will find a wide range of applications in large quantities in our society. Such products will be based on low-cost substrate materials like PEN or PET foils. Building of these printed electronic products is preferably done by combining foils with different functionalities through lamination and interconnection technology. This allows separate functional foils, made using mutually incompatible processing steps, to be combined and also allows independent optimisation of the foils. The current paper describes a novel lamination and interconnection process which uses low-cost solid state adhesive films for the structural bonding and isotropic conductive adhesives for the electrical interconnects. It is shown that the process allows the manufacture of interconnected foils which have a good flexural reliability we demonstrate the process by manufacturing a flexible modular optical sensor for wound monitoring.