Flexible pressure and proximity sensor surfaces manufactured with organic materials

This paper presents the design of two large-area active matrixes on foil for pressure and proximity sensing applications. Frontend circuits based on organic thin-film transistors on foil are laminated with screen-printed PDVF-TrFE piezo and pyro sensors to create the complete flexible sensing systems. After defining the specifications based on the application scenarios, and designing the frontend electronics, the performance of the two sensing surfaces has been investigated in simulation. Numerical results show a readout speed of 5kframe/s and 60dB of dynamic range with impact forces up to 100kN for the 6×10 pixel pressure sensing surface. 40 dB of dynamic range can be achieved with the proximity detector by integrating optical lenses and the pyroelectric sensor array with unambiguous pixel addressing circuitry which exploits organic TFTs.