One of the most attractive features of flexible and printed electronics is the ability to be able to cost-effectively produce billions of flexible integrated circuits (IC). While companies are designing these ICs, other companies are working on systems to manufacture the ICs.
 
PragmatIC has successfully developed flexible integrated circuits for a number of industries, including consumer goods, packaging, security printing and mainstream electronics. As the Cambridge, UK-based company moved into manufacturing, it came up with FlexLogIC, its own fab-in-a-box manufacturing design incorporating numerous processes, which it is now developing for the market.
 
As a result, PragmatIC is in the unique position of being a producer of both ICs and the manufacturing system for them. PragmatIC CEO Scott White said that his company’s decision to develop FlexLogIC is “completely linked” to its work on ICs.
 
“We incorporated the processes that we developed for our ICs and created the FlexLogIC system to manufacture our products,” White said. “FlexLogIC incorporates a mix of printing and conventional techniques that deliver the optimum process for each step of production, along with full automation of the end-to-end manufacturing process.”
 
FlexLogIC offers important advantages, beginning with its high capacity that can produce billions of flexible ICs. There is a low up-front capital cost that White said is 100 to 1000 times less than a silicon fab, and a low production cost of less than 1 cent per flexIC for typical applications.
 
In addition, FlexLogIC will offer a fast production cycle time of less than 24 hours vs. typically more than one month for a silicon fab, allows modular scalability of capacity in geographically diverse supply chains and also allows non-electronics companies the capability to integrate manufacturing of intelligent flexible electronics.
 
“One of the most compelling aspects of our flexIC production process is the potential for it to be implemented in a self-contained, fully automated manufacturing system,” White added. “It has many similarities with the production of optical discs, which several decades ago migrated very successfully from batch production in a cleanroom to this type of modular manufacturing equipment. For several years we have been investigating this potential, and commercial demand is now reaching a point where the mass-market volume requirements closely align with the benefits of such an approach.”
 
There is significant interest in the FlexLogIC system, as seen in the recent announcement that the European Union has awarded PragmatIC a €1.6 million grant under the EU’s Horizon 2020 SME Instrument program to help develop the system, which is expected to reach commercialization by 2017.
 
“This significant grant award provides further validation of the unique and compelling nature of the FlexLogIC equipment, and its potential to drive the commercial roll-out of mass-market flexible electronics,” White said in receiving the funding.
 
White said the market response to FlexLogIC is “extremely positive.”
 
“As well as showing a compelling route to scale production capacity to the required billions/trillions of units, our customers and partners appreciate the demonstrable economic advantages of our approach,” he added.
 
Meanwhile, White noted that PragmatIC’s flexible ICs business is progressing well.
 
“We are seeing very positive growth in commercial uptake of flexible ICs from our current pilot production, which is driving our aggressive timescales for having the first FlexLogIC production system installed in 2017 in order to support mass-market applications by 2018,” White concluded.