Low-Cost Inkjet Printing Technology for the Rapid Prototyping of Transducers.

Recently, there has been an upsurge in efforts dedicated to developing low-cost flexible electronics by exploiting innovative materials and direct printing technologies. This interest is motivated by the need for low-cost mass-production, shapeable, and disposable devices, and the rapid prototyping of electronics and sensors. This review, following a short overview of main printing processes, reports examples of the development of flexible transducers through low-cost inkjet printing technology.

Stripe sensor tomography.

We introduce a general concept of tomographic imaging for the case of an imaging sensor that has a stripelike shape. We first show that there is no difference, in principle, between two-dimensional tomography using conventional electromagnetic or particle radiation and tomography where a stripe sensor is mechanically scanned over a sample at a sequence of different angles. For a single stripe detector imaging, linear motion and angular rotation are required.

Single mode optofluidic distributed feedback dye laser.

Single frequency lasing from organic dye solutions on a monolithic poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) elastomer chip is demonstrated. The laser cavity consists of a single mode liquid core/PDMS cladding channel waveguide and a phase shifted 15th order distributed feedback (DFB) structure. A 1mM solution of Rhodamine 6G in a methanol and ethylene glycol mixture was used as the gain medium.

Nanofluidic tuning of photonic crystal circuits.

By integrating soft-lithography-based nanofluidics with silicon nanophotonics, we demonstrate dynamic, liquid-based addressing and high deltan/n (approximately 0.1) refractive index modulation of individual features within photonic structures at subwavelength length scales. We show ultracompact tunable spectral filtering through nanofluidic targeting of a single row of holes within a planar photonic crystal.