Overview
Flexible electronics seemed to be a good solution to silicon problem giving, theoretical at least, devices that can be more functional and much cheaper.But there is a real big problem that has to be solved. Flexible electronics brought forward the problem of encapsulation. Oxygen and vapor permeability results to degradation of the devices giving them small lifetime and making them unproductive.
The S&T objectives of the OLAtronics Project are the:
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Development and optimization of production processes for active and passive materials by establishing an effective combination of vacuum, wet and printing methods to provide materials with advanced properties, performance, stability & lifetime, low-cost and large-area processing.
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Effective encapsulation of the developed active and passive materials into components, and their large-scale fabrication onto flexible r2r substrates combined to real-time monitoring and control of materials process and quality by in-line optical techniques.
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Integration of the developed manufacturing technologies into a pilot-scale to allow the low-cost and large-area manufacturing of prototype device demonstrators, ultimately in large scale.
OLAtronics will significantly enhance the existing capabilities on the synthesis, preparation, encapsulation and quality control techniques for the development of nanostructured active and passive materials with advanced physical properties. The effectiveness and robustness of the manufacturing processes, and the efficient material encapsulation will be combined with the accurate measurement of the materials optical response, microstructure and morphology by in-situ and real-time optical sensing techniques equipped with advanced analysis & modeling capabilities for the achievement of high performance materials components. These will be used initially for specific FED applications (such as EC displays and OPVs) but ultimately they will be extended to several applications, for example flexible OLED for display and lighting, e-paper, sensors, organic circuits, smart systems on tags, signage, low-cost RFID, etc.