The U.S. military spends $7.5 billion to support flexible circuits, and the scale of the industry may reach 100 billion
According to the latest reports, the U.S. Department of Defense has allocated up to US$7.5 billion in research and development funding to flexible circuit development company NextFlex. The U.S. military fully supports this technology and related products, mainly because it can reduce the weight of electronic equipment carried by soldiers. In addition, skin monitoring sensors can detect fatigue status of soldiers.
Flexible circuit board technology can be used in fields such as solar cells, antennas and radio frequency identification tags. The chips produced by flexible circuits can be rolled up like paper. IDTechEx data shows that the market size of flexible electronic products will grow from US$8.6 billion this year to US$26.2 billion in 2020, exceeding RMB 100 billion.
It is understood that this new technology can be widely used in areas such as car windshields, antennas, solar cells and radio frequency identification tags that need to be embedded with tiny circuits, and the chips produced by the flexible circuits can be rolled up like a piece of paper.
In some cases, semiconductor circuits can be printed onto paper, plastic, or other organic materials, similar to inkjet printing processes. Flexible printed circuit manufacturing could provide more opportunities for semiconductor manufacturing, and some U.S. company executives hope to make flexible circuits harder for foreign factories to copy the same products by developing proprietary technologies.
ANNA