The flexible electronics market is being shaped by several critical trends:

• Wearable Health Technology: The rapid growth of wearable health technology is the primary trend, with flexible electronics enabling comfortable, continuous monitoring devices like smart patches and e-skin.
• Advanced Materials & Manufacturing: Breakthroughs in advanced materials and manufacturing techniques like roll-to-roll processing are making flexible circuits more durable, efficient, and cost-effective to produce at scale.
• Mainstream Consumer Integration: Flexible electronics are becoming mainstream through widespread integration into consumer products like foldable smartphones and within the automotive industry for curved, conformable displays.

Of course. Adapting traditional electronic materials for flexible applications presents a unique set of material science challenges. Here are the four main challenges when trying to make flexible electronic devices:

Conventional electronics are built on rigid, crystalline silicon wafers which are inherently brittle and will crack or shatter when bent, making them fundamentally unsuitable for flexible applications.

Standard conductors like copper and gold, while excellent for moving electricity, suffer from mechanical fatigue and can form micro-cracks when repeatedly flexed or stretched, leading to circuit failure.

Flexible devices are made of multiple thin layers of different materials, which can peel apart (delaminate) from each other under the mechanical stress of repeated bending, causing the device to fail.

The electrical properties of many semiconductor materials change when they are bent or stretched, causing the device’s performance to become unreliable and inconsistent as its shape changes.

We offer solutions across a broad range of applications, including:

• Enhancing Performance: We enable improved photopatterning resolution of both insulating and conductive materials, and facilitate the use of non-photosensitive polymers for advanced Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE) designs.
• Enhancing Versatility: Our products enable the patterning of conductive polymers for next-generation flexible electronic devices – even for polymers that cannot be patterned by any competing technology.
• Enhancing Manufacturing: XLYNX technology allows sensitive electronic materials like quantum dots and perovskites to be photopatterned onto both rigid and flexible substrates, permitting their use in advanced display technologies.

Our technology provides a competitive advantage by enabling the use of materials that are traditionally difficult to cure. We empower manufacturers to optimize key properties like the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), Young’s modulus, and moisture absorption, ensuring unmatched performance and reliability in the most demanding applications.