The vision of flexible electronics is to enable light-weight, cost-effective, power-efficient, and versatile electronic devices to become our daily companions – or in brief, electronics anywhere and anytime. However, despite significant progress in printing techniques, roll-to-roll fabrication, circuit design, and the development of new electronic materials, there is still a large gap between the performance of conventional silicon-based and flexible electronics. This gap is caused by various problems related to processing on flexible substrates, e.g., thermal, mechanical, and chemical stability of flexible substrates, deteriorated charge transport, increased alignment tolerances due to thermal expansion, and many more. In consequence, commercially attractive applications such as wireless communication with flexible sensor tags or high-resolution flexible displays are still a vision of the future. In order to tackle these problems, a joint approach combining material, process, and device development specifically for flexible substrates, is required. In particular, achieving transistors operating above 300 MHz, e.g., needed for medium-range wireless communication, necessitates an effective charge carrier mobility above 20 cm²/(Vs) for a channel length and overlap of electrodes of <1 µm at voltages lower than 5 V. These targets can only be reached if innovative semiconductor materials are combined with tailor-made integration processes and device architectures.


This symposium aims at bringing together researchers from different communities that are concerned with high-performance flexible transistors, printable functional materials, surface engineering, and processing on flexible substrates to elaborate on strategies for next-generation flexible electronic devices.

crystal growth ink-jet printing lithography (deposition) modeling organic oxide perovskites polymer screen printing thin film