Flexible electronics is an important development direction in the future of electronics. At present, scientists have developed some flexible materials with better electronic properties, such as transistor arrays that can be folded and stretched at will, flexible flexible screens, and various types of clothing. Sensors and electronic skin, etc. But in order to realize its great potential, flexible electronic devices must also have a 'hard power', that is, wireless radio communication capabilities. Only with this function, the mobile phone that everyone expects can be reality.
At present, the State Key Laboratory of Precision Testing Technology and Instruments of Tianjin University, the College of Precision Instruments and Optoelectronics Engineering, and the research team of Nanchang Microtechnology Research Institute of Tianjin University have made breakthroughs in this direction. The related research results are flexible for wireless radio frequency communication. "Flexible Film Bulk Acoustic Wave Filters toward Radio Frequency Wireless Communication" was published on the international authoritative journal "SMALL" on May 17 and was selected as the cover article as a key recommendation.
The mobile phone is an electronic device that is a master of wireless radio frequency communication technology, and can realize high-speed transmission of data quietly. In today's smart phone era, not only can many sensor signals be collected and control signals are transmitted, and information flow between devices is realized. The interaction can also be applied to the massive node data transmission of the Internet of Things and big data. However, such a 'powerful' mobile phone is still hard and inflexible, because it is still a research problem to enable flexible electronic devices with high-speed wireless communication capabilities. .
The Tianda research team pioneered flexible RF filtering technology and successfully developed a flexible RF filter using an innovative process called FlexMEMS (Flexible MEMS), which can be directly applied to wireless RF communication in flexible electronics in the future. The results were completed by doctoral student Jiang Yuan under the guidance of Professor Pang Wei and Assistant Professor Zhang Menglun.
The RF filter is an indispensable core component of the RF communication module. The role of the RF communication module is to receive, transmit and fine-tune (filter, amplify, modem, digital-to-analog, etc.) data and information, RF filtering The device can avoid mutual interference between radio frequency electromagnetic signals of different sources and different uses, and plays a role in screening specific target electromagnetic wave signals.
'The electrical performance indicators of the flexible RF filter we developed have reached the level of commercial RF filters in current smartphones'. Jiang Yuan said.
The team's first FlexMEMS process technology enables the fabrication of MEMS devices with high-precision movable microstructures on ultra-thin plastic substrates, solving high-precision and high-quality films with high-precision and high-quality films. Incompatibility issues in device design, fabrication, and packaging.
In addition, this technology is not limited to the manufacture of flexible RF filters, but can also be applied to the manufacture of a variety of flexible microelectromechanical devices such as pressure gauges, accelerometers, gyroscopes, ultrasonic recognition and imaging units, projection imaging units, microphones, etc. Flexible electronic devices have the ability to perceive the outside world (such as virtual reality) and even the outside world (such as reality enhancement).
'Next, we plan to develop a flexible electronic system with complete wireless RF communication function based on the existing flexible RF filtering technology. Not only the mobile phone can be flexibly stretched, but also flexible, allowing flexible electronic devices to have 'communication' (refers to wireless communication), 'thinking' (referring to computing), 'memory' (referring to storage) functions, and even 'perceived' (referring to sensing) and 'reforming' (referring to display, imaging, etc.) the world's ability is also just around the corner. Pang Wei thinks.
