Process Design Kit and Design Automation for Flexible Hybrid Electronics
Tsung-Ching Huang1, Ting Lei2,5, Leilai Shao3, Sridhar Sivapurapu4, Madhavan Swaminathan4, Sicheng Li1, Zhenan Bao2, Kwang-Ting Cheng3,6 and Raymond Beausoleil1
1Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, USA
2Department of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, USA
3Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
4School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
5Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China
6Department of Electric and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
ABSTRACT
High-performance low-cost flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) are desirable for internet of things (IoT). Carbonnanotube (CNT) thin-film transistor (TFT) is a promising candidate for high-performance FHE because of its high carrier mobility (25cm2/V.s), superior mechanical flexibility/stretchability, and material compatibility with low-cost printing and solution processes. Flexible sensors and peripheral CNT-TFT circuits, such as decoders, drivers and sense amplifiers, can be printed and integrated with thinned (<50μm) silicon chips on soft, thin, and flexible substrates for appealing product designs and form factors. Here we report: 1) process design kit (PDK) to enable FHE design automation, from device modeling to physical verification, and 2) open-source and solution-process proven intellectual property (IP) blocks, including Pseudo-CMOS [1] digital logic and analog amplifiers on flexible substrates, as shown in Figure 1. The proposed FHE-PDK and circuit design IP are fully compatible with silicon design EDA tools, and can be readily used for co-design with both CNT-TFT circuits and silicon chips.
Keywords: Flexible hybrid electronics, Thin-film transistors, Carbon-nanotube, Thinned silicon chips
