Autoflex+

Printed electronics built on plastic and other cheap substrates (paper/card) can enable new products in high volume markets such as consumer packaging and anti-counterfeit labels. Conventional electronics on PCBs is rigid, difficult to distribute within products and over-engineered, resulting in high cost for these applications. Replacing the PCB with flexible (printed) electronics overcomes these constraints to enable many new ultrathin form-factor products. Novel manufacturing processes are required to meet the extremely high-volumes of these applications and integrate the components. Existing integration solutions such as pick-and-place do not cost-effectively scale to the very-high volumes required by consumer packaging and security products (ultimately >1trn units pa). Autoflex+ follows-on from Autoflex (101538) which completed on 31st March 2015. Within Autoflex the consortium (PragmatIC, Optek, CPI and Henkel) developed a process suitable for integration of flexible and PE components. Autoflex+ will develop this further to establish a pilot manufacturing system for automated integration and assembly of products based on PE components.