Michelle Farrington1
AFFOA1
For E-textiles to truly make the shift from generating small volume products for highly specialized markets to a widely adopted toolkit of technologies used to enable products across a diverse set of applications, the industry must mature in a number of ways that go beyond the demonstration of new capabilities. Industry infrastructure development must be undertaken in order to support lower product development costs and faster time to market for e-textile products. These infrastructure elements include simulation environments, digital threads, and addressing standards gaps to name a few. Through collaborative R&D work enabled by a public-private partnership, AFFOA is resolving manufacturing technology gaps through investment in broad industry infrastructure development. Example projects combining government needs with industry driven technology roadmaps will illustrate the current methods our Institute uses to address technology and infrastructure gaps.