Process Design Kit and Design Automation for Flexible Hybrid Electronics

• DOI: 10.1109/vlsi-dat.2019.8741745
• Publication Date: 2019-06-21T02:19:04Z
• Authors: Tsung-Ching Huang; Ting Lei; Leilai Shao; Sridhar Sivapurapu; Madhavan Swaminathan; Sicheng Li; Zhenan Bao; Kwang-Ting Cheng; Raymond Beausoleil
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 03 medical and health sciences; 7. Clean energy

High-performance low-cost flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) are desirable for applications such as internet of things (IoT) and wearable electronics. Carbon-nanotube (CNT) thin-film transistor (TFT) is a promising candidate for high-performance FHE, because of its high carrier mobility, superior mechanical flexibility, and material compatibility with low-cost printing and solution-processes. Flexible sensors and peripheral CNT-TFT circuits, such as decoders, drivers and sense amplifiers, can be printed and hybrid-integrated with thinned (<50µm) silicon chips on soft, thin, and flexible substrates for a wide range of applications from flexible displays to wearable medical devices. Here we report: 1) process design kit (PDK) to enable FHE design automation for large-scale FHE circuits, and 2) solution-process proven intellectual property (IP) blocks for TFT circuits design, including Pseudo-CMOS [1] flexible digital logic and analog amplifiers shown in Figure 1.