PragmatIC is a world leader in manufacturing ultra low cost flexible electronics enabling the potential for trillions of “smart objects” that can interact with their environment.
It has developed a unique platform of patented technologies to design and manufacture flexible integrated circuits (flex ICs), also known as “printed logic”.
These flex ICs deliver intelligent electronics without the need for rigid, bulky and expensive silicon chips and can be easily embedded in any surface, introducing interactivity into a wide range of everyday items.
PragmatIC’s unique advantage derives from several key innovations:
- Functional electronic materials that are much cheaper than silicon, and able to be formed on flexible plastic substrates in extremely thin films – less than 100 nm thick, about 1000 times thinner than a human hair!
- Patterning processes that are able to accurately define features in these thin film materials, also at very fine scale (less than 100 nm), but are dramatically simpler and faster than the processes used in an expensive silicon fabrication plant.
- Novel architectures for transistors (and other key electronic devices) that ensure perfect alignment of all critical device features, even when fabricated on plastic substrates that expand, contract or move during processing.
Now PragmatIC is developing Flex Log IC: a unique “fab-in-a-box” model for low capital, high capacity manufacturing of flex ICs. This model will allow PragmatIC to scale up production capacity dramatically, and specifically to do so with a very low capital cost and per-unit production cost, as well as automating the complete process to allow it to sell this equipment to supply chain partners.
“We incorporated the processes that we developed for our ICs and created the Flex Log IC system to manufacture our products” PragmatIC CEO Scott White said. “Flex 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.”
Read More: Printable Circuits by PragmatIC Changing the IoT Future