Place: Auditorium (Room 0215), Building 3 (between Build 2 and Build 3)

Abstract: Ambient intelligence is the term used to describe the latest generation of electronic products, pervading everyday life. It is based on adaptable, flexible, smart, and unobtrusive or even “invisible” devices that integrate a range of electronic capabilities, including interaction with the user, e.g. through display function, sensory functions, and information storage. Typical applications of electronic devices in the ambient intelligent world are indicated by notions as “the connected house”, “wearable electronics” and “the portable office”.

The enabler of ambient intelligence is systems-in-foil, an emerging new class of flexible electronic products in which complete systems are integrated in thin polymeric foils. An historical overview of the basic material choices and fabrication concepts will be given. The status of flexible displays, from electrophoretic displays to organic light emitting diodes, and RFID transponders for smart labels will be presented.

The applications as smart food packaging and wearable health monitors require programmable non-volatile memory, similar to the well-known Flash memory. The more complex the application, the more memory it needs. We investigate ferroelectric memories based on soluble ferroelectric polymers and organic semiconductors. The ferroelectric polarization yields the binary information that can restively be read out by a semiconductor. The recent progress will be discussed.

Biography of the reporter:

Dago de Leeuw is a research fellow at Philips Research Laboratories and professor in molecular electronics at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. In 2012 he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research Mainz, Germany. He has worked on materials science and technology of phosphors, high-T_c superconductors, laser ablation, ferroelectrics and polymer electronics. The activities have led to 30 US patents and 260 regular papers. Hirsch index is 60. His current research interests are  molecular electronics, non-volatile data storage and biosensors.