In 2015, NextFlex, America’s Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute, was established in 2015 in San Jose, CA. Part of the Manufacturing USA network, NextFlex is a public-private partnership supported by the U.S. Department of Defense under a cooperative agreement with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Dr. Malcolm Thompson served as the first executive director.

The idea behind NextFlex is to create an ecosystem centered on flexible hybrid electronics. During its first decade, NextFlex now has more than 210 organizations as members, and managed more than $400 million in 240 manufacturing and technology projects. NextFlex has set up three regional US nodes in Massachusetts, Missouri, and New York, as well as an end-to-end pilot scale design, prototype and manufacturing facility in Silicon Valley.

NextFlex also has established education and workforce development programs, working with more than 25,000 students around the US. 

Dr. Thompson announced his retirement last year after 10 years, and to follow Dr. Thompson, NextFlex has named Dr. Daniel Gamota to lead NextFlex into its next chapter as executive director. Dr. Gamota began his new role on Sept. 1, 2024.

Prior to NextFlex, Dr. Gamota has more than 25 years leading major companies in the fields of microelectronics, advanced packaging, complex integrated systems, and flexible hybrid electronics. Most recently, Dr. Gamota was VP at Jabil, and with Motorola, where he served as director and fellow of the technical staff.

He is well-known for heading R&D and collaborative innovation teams. In addition, Dr. Gamota has led several multi-member microelectronics systems solutions development programs (DARPA, NIST ATP, etc.)

He is a member of the SEMI Board of Industry Leaders, University of Michigan MSE External Advisory Board, and San Jose State University Engineering Industry Advisory Council. Dr. Gamota is also active in and has chaired committees developing microelectronics, advanced packaging, and flexible hybrid electronics guidelines, standards, and roadmaps for IEEE, iNEMI, IPC, IEC, A*STAR, and SEMI. Dr. Gamota was elevated to a NextFlex Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and was named a Dan Noble Fellow at Motorola for his contributions and leadership.

Dr. Gamota’s first notable efforts in the flexible hybrid electronics sector came in 1999 at Motorola.

“We were asked to design and manufacture a credit card-sized product with as much solid-state memory. The government customer was interested in streaming video for real-time situation awareness,” Dr Gamota recalled. “We had to rely on state-of-the-art processes as well as innovative approaches to thin 8in wafers, down to the necessary thickness of 25 microns to achieve the memory density required by the customerok.”

In 2000, Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for organic semiconductors, and that led to the first foray for Motorola into flexible and printed electronics.

“After the announcement of the Nobel Prize, senior technology executives at Motorola asked whether we could fabricate backplanes for displays without using silicon,” said Dr. Gamota. “That started our intrapreneurial efforts in printed electronics, but in parallel still supported microelectronics R&D trends such as thinning of silicon wafers. In addition, an external community was established by USDC and later FlexTech Alliance to investigate the emerging field of printed electronics.

“NextFlex brought advanced microelectronics such as thin silicon, flexible substrates, and printed electronics together,” he added. “The network of manufacturing innovation institutions are set up to establish robust ecosystems to support emerging technologies such as hybrid electronics. Also, institutions like NextFlex, are able to partner with some of the other institutes to foster greater collaborative innovation.”

Dr. Gamota has long been associated with NextFlex, as Jabil is a founding member as well as a partner on developmental projects.

“Jabil has participated as an active member to help shape NextFlex projects calls and has been asked to be a participant on some teams to provide the discipline necessary to move late-stage development projects to scalable manufacturing,” said Dr. Gamota.

For Dr. Gamota, leading NextFlex is “a dream job.”

“It is a dream job because it pulls together the three communities for success – academia, industry and government,” he continued. “NextFlex has done a phenomenal job in bringing these three groups together to establish an ecosystem and supply chain to support a robust innovation pipeline for hybrid electronics. NextFlex is organized to be extremely nimble to develop the critical building blocks that address the dynamic demands for scalable manufacturing environments.

“For me personally, it’s a dream job because I have lived through several electronics innovation waves in my career,” he added. “I was part of a team at Motorola that introduced bare die and advanced microelectronics packaging to create families of flip phones. Later when I was asked to look for disruptions, I went into printed electronics and saw the opportunities and challenges to fabricate OFET active matrix backplanes. Later at Jabil, every day was a limitless innovation-rich day for me. I went from a vertically integrated company active in a handful of verticals to an EMS company with hundreds of customers looking for innovations such as hybrid electronics, advanced packaging, and complex integrated systems.

“I see this as a way to pursue my passion for driving the hybrid electronics platform to many different verticals,” he noted. “We can promote the opportunities that are best suited for hybrid electronics. I feel this is reminiscent of what I saw in the mid-1990s, when IBM offered a host of microelectronics innovations to companies such as Motorola seeking solutions to miniaturize products. Today, we have the CHIPS Act to accelerate collaborative innovation and launch products faster. Joining NextFlex gives me the opportunity to leverage many of the skills I have developed, while I am enjoying my passion for innovation and collaboration.”

Dr. Gamota believes that the future of hybrid electronics is one of great promise to offer a pipeline of innovations and will excite individuals seeking careers in electronics design & manufacturing, and NextFlex has a significant role to play.

“Flexible hybrid electronics is almost ubiquitous. When you go to CES in Las Vegas and look at the products on display, you can use your engineering lens and see there are products that have integrated hybrid electronics,” Dr. Gamota observed. “There is a plethora of established products that use hybrid electronics, and even though they may not be highly visible to the public, I think the technology has achieved success.

“Going forward, we need NextFlex to continue to establish disciplined design guidelines and process rules, build a supply chain that is resilient, and strengthen the ecosystem necessary to industrialize hybrid electronics technologies and make them available to the masses,” he added. “That is the next stage – we’ve gone from high visibility, high level promotion to acceptance by designers as a robust solution. The next stage is to maximize its diffusion into the industry. Hybrid electronics should not be considered as a disrupting technology – it’s enabling technology to offer products with extreme functionality.

“NextFlex is a community of innovators who are very open and practical in their thinking and very much respectful of member ideas; we all share the common goal of seeing hybrid electronics become the preferred tool in the toolbox,” Dr. Gamota concluded. “We have a wave of talent that is coming into the industry and looking to innovate differently, not just innovating by using the tried-and-true traditional microelectronics design and manufacturing methods. At NextFlex, I’ve been given all of the tools and talent. Now I’m ready for the journey.”