Heterointegration of Complete Systems Based on Polytronics

Organic Electronics is expected to be a promising technology for low-cost and large-area electronic systems to support information and communication technology, sensor networks, life sciences, medical and bio-sensing devices. This paper presents an overview of the hybrid hetero-integration approach for flexible electronic foil systems so-called "Polytronics" developed at Fraunhofer IZM. Core of the process is a hybrid approach based on most-polymer materials and partially-(im-)printed technologies to reach reasonable performance of systems. Moreover this approach enables the possibility to process directly on functional flexible foil substrates. The hybrid processing aims at integrating more and more additive processes so that resource losses and chemicals use overheads are reduced intrinsically. The environmental improvement potential has been evaluated for comparable functional units. It can be shown that while some polytronic processes on a lab scale would lead to significant environmental impact, the hybrid hetero-integration is on its way to very low impact and low cost processing.