Fabricating functional components in room temperature
Electroceramics are key materials in all electronics. These ceramic components are used for example in sensing of force, acceleration, and humidity, in energy harvesting, and in frequency tuning of antennas and filters. They are also used for miniaturization and packaging of electronics systems and devices. The main disadvantage of electroceramics is that the fabrication requires relatively high investments and it consumes significant amount of energy due to high sintering temperatures (850-2000 oC). This also makes limitations in contacting and an integration with other materials. However, in the last few years realization of electroceramic components with room temperature fabrication (RTF) has become possible. Our ERC project “Printed Electroceramics with Ultimate Compositions” led to extremely interesting discoveries and opens up a totally new horizons to fabricate functional composites at room temperature. The new finding to use densification process of ceramics at room temperature and post-processing at very low (120 °C) temperature opened a utilization pathway for successful multimaterial system integration.We demonstrated that RTF is feasible for realization e.g. dielectrics based on Li2MoO4 ceramics and its composites while new endeavors in integration will be done in this proposed PoC project. Three main application areas, namely wireless 5G, IoT and automotive are all eagerly looking for new approaches for integration, packaging and sensing. In this Proof-of-Concept we will focus on utilization steps to evaluate RTF composite technology in e.g. accelerometer and antenna components so that the first industrially applicable prototypes and samples can be manufactured and demonstrated.