Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Exploring new additive manufacturing paradigms is essential for the Canadian economy. Printable flexible hybrid electronics is one of these rapidly-emerging sectors. In addition to help train highly-qualified personnel, build international research collaborations and establish fruitful partnerships with the industry, the long-term impact of this research would be to provide novel low-cost and high-performance printable architectures to use as cost-effective alternatives for a wide-range of sensing applications from wearable electronics to IoT and create real value for Canada's industry. In recent years, there was an extraordinary push to develop new and better low-cost and printable optoelectronic platforms for solar-energy harvesting, lighting & displays and sensing applications. Meanwhile, exciting new printable material systems have also gained tremendous momentum in the last 5 years. With this strategic project, our team of internationally-recognized leaders seeks to (1) exploit new printable optoelectronic materials and their unique properties, (2) adapt their standard laboratory-level processing to use cutting-edge commercial-grade printing capabilities, (3) integrate these materials into new fully-printable sensor device architectures and (4) provide a complete, autonomous and fully-printable sensing platform. The massive push for intelligent cyber-physical systems associated with the Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT) revolutions aims at informed real-time decision making based on better and readily-acquired sets of data. For biomedical, manufacturing, wearables or general consumer electronic applications, better and cheaper sensor architectures proposed in this project and produced by additive printable electronic manufacturing (APEM) will obviously be at the core of this profound transformation.