IoT device fabrication using roll-to-roll printing process

Thanh Huy Phung,Kyoung Min Kim,Inyoung Kim,Sung Yong Kim,Anton Nailevich Gafurov,Taik-Min Lee

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-99436-0

Abstract

With the development of technology, wireless and IoT devices are increasingly used from daily life to industry, placing demands on rapid and efficient manufacturing processes. This study demonstrates the fabrication of an IoT device using a roll-to-roll printing process, which could shorten the device fabrication time and reduce the cost of mass production. Here, the fabricated IoT device is designed to acquire data through the sensor, process the data, and communicate with end-user devices via Bluetooth communication. For fabrication, a four-layer circuit platform consisting of two conductive layers, an insulating layer including through holes, and a solder resist layer is directly printed using a roll-to-roll screen printing method. After the printing of the circuit platform, an additional layer of solder paste is printed to assemble the electrical components into the device, inspiring the fully roll-to-roll process for device fabrication. Successful IoT device deployment opens the chance to broaden the roll-to-roll fabrication process to other flexible and multilayer electronic applications.

Highlights

With the development of technology, wireless and IoT devices are increasingly used from daily life to industry, placing demands on rapid and efficient manufacturing processes
The blooming of Industry 4.0 has opened the wide use of IoT (Internet of things) in various areas, from daily life to science, technology, and manufacturing[1,2,3], requiring the mass production of IoT devices to meet market demands
For IoT devices, flexible printed electronics is a good option for device fabrication due to its various advantages such as being thin, lightweight, and cost-efficient[4,5,6]

Summary

Introduction

With the development of technology, wireless and IoT devices are increasingly used from daily life to industry, placing demands on rapid and efficient manufacturing processes. With the grown of printed electronics technology, the use of printed devices capable of wireless communication has been increasing for applications that require compact size and remote distance sensing or actuation, such as wearable, healthcare devices[15], or robotics[16] For this purpose, several approaches have been proposed. Our approach is to print multilayer circuit boards as circuit platforms for the devices using R2R printing, assemble commercially available solid-state or flexible printed devices to implement the IoT devices, which has been well-known as “hybrid fabrication”[4,5] By this approach, the number and types of sensing or electronics components become flexible. Note that the mounting of electronics could be automatic, which inspires a fully R2R process for the fabrication of the devices

Methods

Results

Conclusion