Thursday, May 16, 2013
8:00 AM to 5:00 PM
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Materials and process technology has advanced to a stage where inexpensively printing high performance devices on continuous rolls of flexible polymer-based substrates now promises to revolutionize future consumer electronics. A combination of emerging materials and processes will make it possible to economically generate multifunctional, high value-added technology products over large areas at high processing rates on plastic film, paper, or foil, while achieving feature dimensions as small as 10 nanometers in manufactured systems encompassing billions of identical devices. A range of materials encompassing organic, inorganic, and composite nanomaterials will enable a range of new consumer products including flexible displays, LED lighting, solar photovoltaics, integrated circuits and data storage. Process scale-up strategies will rely on top-down and bottom-up nanoscale processes including nanoimprint and sub-wavelength lithography, guided self-assembly and direct patterning methodologies. Future industrialization of this technology requires scaling system properties while retaining the collective properties of the base materials or nanoscopic elements over macroscale dimensions. Meeting this challenge is a key to high-rate manufacturing of flexible device and electronic products, as well as for establishing viable industrial-scale manufacturing platforms.

This Symposium will bring together experts from academia and industry to describe the latest in advanced materials and processes leading to scalable manufacturing methodologies for next generation flexible and electronic devices. Topics will include flexible electronics, organic photovoltaics (OPV), organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), flexible displays, nanocomposites, additive-driven assembly, roll-to-roll (R2R) processing, and emerging tools.

The symposium is being held in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s
2013 Spring Polymer Event, which includes a day of industry affiliate program meetings on May
15. Details can be found at http://www.pse.umass.edu/cumirp/events.html.

Symposium sponsors are the National Nanomanufacturing Network and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing, in cooperation with the FlexTech Alliance, with financial support from NSF (CMMI-1025020).