>> Xiaodong He: It's my pleasure to introduce Doctor Devin Mackenzie. Devon is a colleague of
mine at the University of Washington. He's also the Washington Research Foundation
Professor of Clean Energy at University of Washington. He has a joint faculty appointment in
both the Materials Science and Engineering Department and the Mechanical Engineering
Department. Devon has had a rather distinguished career over the last 17 years where he has
been a leader, a scientist who goes into the lab, works and also an entrepreneur in the area of
flexible electronics and printable electronics. Devon actually was the founder of the first
flexible splash printer with an electronics company called Plastic Logic in Cambridge the United
Kingdom. Currently apart from being a professor at the University of Washington, he is also the
chief technology officer of Imprint Energy a company that develops high-energy batteries.
Devon has only 110 patents and a number of publications. He got his bachelor's at MIT and his
PhD at the University of Florida. In 2015 his company was selected to be the top 50 smartest
companies by MIT technology. With that I'll stop and let Devon tell us more about printable
electronics.
>> Devin MacKenzie: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm relatively new to Washington.
And this is certainly my first time outside of the lake. I'm going to talk to you today about print
electronics and sort of touch on a few areas. Of course the field although new, covers many,
many areas. I'd like to introduce a concept of printing and why it's so old and so new, why it's
disruptive both in terms of how we make devices in a disruptive way to make semi conductors
and energy devices, but also disruptive in the types of form factors of products you can make
from this in an economical way. And I'll talk a little bit of how this relates to advanced
manufacturing which is the reason why I'm here today and the reason why the University of
Washington, the State of Washington and the governor as well wanted to bring the University
into supporting federal initiatives in advanced manufacturing and why printing is a significant
part of that for high-tech manufacturing future in the United States. Then I'll talk about some
interesting form factors and applications both in terms of the work of the university but also
imprint energy in the startup companies as an entrepreneurial example. And then I'll talk a
little bit about the scalable printable electronics lab building at the University of Washington
and the initiatives there and how that might lead to interactions with industrial partners, which
is part of the reason why I came. What's old is new. Printing and even some of the printing
techniques we use are very, very old concepts. It's kind of debatable who invented it, but we're
talking about some of the Egyptian tomb paintings in 400 A.D. include printed, basically screen
printing as a technology. All the way through to the Polynesian islanders is to take banana
leaves and rubbed out the soft organic matter and used to use those to print things on fabrics
and textiles and this is in the first millennia A.D.. And then later the concept of that is later
defused into Asia and Indochina and they were the first ones to kind of perfect things like
silkscreen printing which made much higher imaging. Then later that became the basis for the
information age, which was really about printing, Gutenberg and how we could disseminate
information by printing. And then maybe the next significant advance was in the 19th century.
In about the 1840s they started roll printing. It's a very old idea but actually kind of a new idea
to semi conductor manufacturing which is even more primitive essentially, Stone Age
photography, lithium and stone. The way you make semi conductors today and many devices
today is a fundamentally energetically and resource wasteful approach. The only reason you
get away with it is because the amount of information you can pack per unit space is so high
that you can make it make sense. But fundamentally, it's a subtractor process in the sense that
you start with some sort of base substrate. You use relatively high energy expense backend
coding, physical vapor deposition, other deposition processes which require quite high energies
and high temperatures. You coated with variously high engineered polymer, very expensive
and usually environmentally unsound photo acids and other things. You pattern that UV light.
You throw away most of that. Then you use that to etch yet another toxic effluent etching
process and then you throw away that mess completely and you end up with your final feature.
You have kind of gone through three steps of constant removal and disposal of material to get
to your final target. I'm not discriminatory. This is what I learned. This is how I started. As a
PhD I was in 3.5 up to electronics and I did this, many hours of this. But it was actually through
my experience at Cambridge where I went to work on an emerging new field called organic
electronics. We were starting to replace silicon and gym nitride with organic molecular
material that also behaved as semi conductors. They were really slow. They were really crude.
They had short lifetimes, but they had some very special properties. The first one that was
exciting was they were highly luminescent, like laser dyes and organic dyes can be very
luminescent, silicon notoriously port luminescent three fives, okay, pretty good at luminescing,
but very expensive and not so easy to make. The other thing that really drove me in interest in
these new materials was how you could process them. During my PhD we were trying to grow
gym nitride. We were trying to grow cubic gym nitride on silicon one-on-one surfaces, hetero
epitaxy. If you had more than a fraction percent mismatch of the crystal lattice between the
epitaxial film you were growing underneath, you would have threading dislocations and an
optical disaster and nothing would work. Organic electronics you can completely remove that
constraint. You can integrate hetero structures from different electron transports, band
energies, conduction band edges, valence band edges and alternate stacks with no question of
hetero integration, no lattice match required, so you could really build these much more
elegant and complex structures very simply just from sequential coding from solution you can
dissolve these molecules into solutions, form inks and coat them or then print them. And so
printing is, in the essence, taking this process and turning it into that. We are completely
additively, we are depositing. We are taking a material and additively depositing it exactly what
we want and where we want, not throwing anything away, and we're using materials that are
molecular. They're semi conductive system is already set up. We're not assembling a crystal.
The microsystem is already defined by the chemistry, so we don't have to go to 600 c, 800 c
1000 c to anneal out crystalline defects from this sort of thing. The semi conductive system's
already made in the molecule and we are just placing it where we want. That's really disruptive
in terms of how you can make things, the cost you can make things. We start thinking about
things like [indiscernible] the amount of energy it takes to make things. There's another aspect,
and so maybe when you first start thinking that I've got an inkjet printer. I could be printing
circuit traces instead of getting a PCB made, deposited, etched and all this sort of stuff. That
immediately jumps to mind is, to me at least, is additive and novel. There's another thing that's
almost more significant and sometimes overlooked, which is how things are really made. How
things are really made, you know, my phone here involves 50 different companies and vendors.
You would think when I got into this I always thought it's a high-tech industry. There's massive
amounts of automation. It's a super high technology robots and all these great things. That's
not how these devices are made anymore. Microprocessors are made a bit like that. These
devices are not made like that. Why? Because this device changes. Every six months they're
making a new one. And although it seems like they make a lot, in terms of mass manufacturing
the actual number of units they make of any particular design is actually not that large. There's
a massive amount of manual assembly and integration in this device. That's why they go to the
lowest labor markets is because there's a huge amount of manual assembly both in the
electronic subcomponents and in the integration of those components. People like Foxcon and
Flextronics, they are very good at managing those laborers. That's essentially what they do.
They're a contract Army for hire, mercenaries for hire, to assemble and integrate components,
silicon components up to electronic components. Separate PCBs are usually made somewhere
else and brought in. Batteries is a very manual assembly process and then those get brought in
in separate modules. All of these things come together and get integrated largely manually
with assembly by hand into this integrated, in this case we are talking about flexible electronics,
integrated system on flex combining with rigid solid components from many, many different
sources. You think about all of the different specializations here, all the different transport
costs of getting all of those components here all to this place and the amount of manual
assembly it takes and then shipping it from there back to where these things were made in the
first place. A lot of energy and a lot of trouble invested. Printing is fundamentally different.
Roll printing in its purest form is a continuous web process where you go from stage to stage to
stage on a continuous web. Especially in semiconductor manufacturing one of the biggest
problems in making LCD displays, a huge fraction of the money and yield loss is not about the
individual unit processes. It's about getting this 2 meter by 2 meter piece of glass from one tool
to the next. The amount of manual handling, it's not manual anymore. Now it's robot
handling, but they are literally picking up cassettes of gigantic bowing pieces of glass trying to
pick those up on various forks and vacuums and get them from tool to tool. That sort of
manual handling is actually a very significant issue in the throughput of even LCD panels. When
you're talking about roll to roll, that kind of handling is completely eliminated. It's completely,
there is no interspersing step. It's a continuous web. It goes from maybe an initial surface
treatment through, this is a flexographic printing station. It dries on that. Then you go to
maybe a gravure print here, a drying state, next step drying stage, print some electrodes, drying
stage, and then you can actually coat adhesive and laminate and then package and build a
continuous device start to finish with zero manual handling. No one touches this device from
start to finish, no robot were no person. So it's fundamentally, and we can integrate lots of
different functionality all in the same substrate. You not only are doing additive processing, but
you're also eliminating that multistage integration network to produce this device. That
presents something interesting and maybe not obvious in terms of labor force. Now that I'm an
educator we worry about educating engineers and what they feed going to go into and what's
going to happen to the technology base for the United States. You start looking at printing and
you think printing is cheap, right? Newspapers, this is old stuff, black paper; it's dirty. You
crank it out. Actually, printing is a very high technology driven manufacturing. If you look at
where the printing industry happens and you see these are the top eight companies where the
printing happens, you see China here, but China is a very big country. But look. Japan, the
United States, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, France, Canada, these are not known as low-cost
labor markets to manufacture. In fact, in my current company in my entire career in printed
electronics, I have never been to China. I've been entirely in Europe. I've been in Scandinavia
and I've been in Japan. The most expensive per capita places to manufacture in the world. In
fact the initial licensees for my company, we had two for batteries and one is in Denmark and
one is in Sweden. You would never expect that. But if you think a little bit about it, it starts to
make sense. It's not about manual handling. It's about running a highly precise automated
piece of equipment where it's about process engineering, very tightly controlled process
engineering which domestically in these countries, the United States and others are very good
at. And it's about the functional materials. It's about very high value add materials and the
very controlled use of those. Printing, when you go to Target, they give you the printer. For
$99 you can buy a huge piece of technology. They give you that. Why? Because they're going
to charge you a lot of money for the inks and paper. That's how they get you. That's true for
the printing industry as a whole. It's about those high functional, high-value add materials that
really drive the economics of printing. Certainly in graphics printing, proximity to market is
important. You don't want to take it, ship your design somewhere else, have it made
somewhere else and ship it back, whenever it's a relatively inexpensive item. If we are going to
print internet of things labels for every device, those labels need to be ten cents or something
like that. We don't want to have to ship a ten cent item all the way from China and back. It
doesn't make sense to do that. Also, these things change fast. Just in a time delay, we also
don't want that time delay. That sort of spurred interest from the federal government. Back in
the days of the, what was is supposed to be? The great recession? It really wasn't true in
California and probably not in Washington either. Certainly house prices didn't go down. But
during the recession the Obama administration started the stimulus package. One of the planks
of the stimulus package was how to stimulate high paying, high technology jobs in the United
States. They funded these manufacturing innovation institutes to promote high-technology
manufacturing that could stay in the U.S. instead of immediately going overseas, which is what
happened in the past. In the beginning of this field we were doing plastic logic. In my first
startup we were in displays and there was actually a United States display consortium. How
many displays are made in the United States right now? Almost none. It was not a success, but
the idea was that because that market was not appropriate. That ship had already sailed and
we were too late. But in the printing industry, the high functional electronic printing industry,
we think we are not too late. We are actually at the forefront of it. In terms of technology
advances, it's neck and neck between the U.S. and Europe as to who is leading technology wise
in print electronics. There are 70 of these manufacturing innovation institutes and that covers
all fields, everything from electronics to steel to building buildings. Three out of the seven
involve printing. Additive Manufacturing, this is 3-D printing. This is in Detroit. Digital
Manufacturing and Design, sort of related but related to controlling manufacturing and just in
time manufacturing, digital manufacturing. And then Next Flex, the flexible hybrid electronics
manufacturing innovation Institute. This is the Institute that University of Washington is now a
part of and I'm helping lead that connection and this is about flexible electronics, the significant
component of which would be printed, things like batteries, sensors, interconnection and
things of that sort. To get a little bit on the technology side, what do we mean when we talk
about printed electronics? There are two categories. One is digital and we have the prototype
digital print electronics is inkjet printing. We have drop on demand, piezo electric drop ondemand inkjet heads, just like your Epson or your Canon inkjet that sits on your desktop. But
instead it's been modified, Mims based heads, also look in which materials, high temperature
materials, so that its compatible with things like nano particle metal-based inks and much
higher resolution. Graphic arts resolution, you're talking about something like 15 micron, one
hundred micron features, the smallest, and typically bigger. You don't want to make anything
smaller than what you can see. It's graphic arts, after all. In electronics we want to push into
low micron or even sub micron scale imaging. These are much higher spec. Instead of a $99
printer this is a $25,000 printer. But still, functionally, you feed in data, you feed in image
control data and you can raster and drop on-demand and digitally print an image. There was a
lot of work in the deposition systems, but a lot of the hard work is focused on the materials
development. In order to produce materials that end up as a functional, in this case, this is a
nano particle silver. It started off as silver nanoparticles just dispersed in an organic solvent,
maybe 4 nanometer, 10 nanometer silicon nano crystallites. Those are now small enough that
they're dispersible into a solution like dissolving salt in water. They are so small that the
electric forces can disperse them and now we can use that as an ink and run it through our
printer. Once we get it on the substrate we drive it but we don't have the metal yet. We have
to center that metal and actually grow those crystallites and turn it back into a continuous
metal. But with that, that's a lot of engineering over the last 10 years has gone into the. Now
we're able to regularly produce digitally printed sensor arrays, printed circuit traces down to
maybe the width unassisted maybe to the 10 micron sort of feature size. Plastic logic, how we
were, our trick was we were taking surface energy control and turning that process to define
the gate of a transistor instead of limiting it to 10 micron to bring it down to one micron or even
down to a nanometer from a printed process. And that's all about digital printing. One of the
aspects, the pros here of digital printing are drop on-demand. We can print anything we want.
That's the most expensive way you get to print something. Your inkjet printer per page is
probably tens of cents per page, but you like it because at home you only print one of
something and then you print something else. When you want to print the newspaper you
don't use inkjet. You use other techniques. You use high throughput technologies, roll-based
techniques. This is a gravure printer that was co-developed with a startup company that I
helped found in Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz California doing role printed the OLEDs, flexible
OLEDs for flexible displays. This is actually a gravure roll system made to go on flatbed for
photo typing and these involve essentially roll to roll compatible processing because they are
roll-based printing systems themselves. You essentially have a cylinder. This is called a gravure
cylinder and the gravure for engraved essentially. And you engraved a pattern into a large
metal cylinder. Those patterns can be engraved onto the sub micron scale using a laser to
engraved into this metal cylinder. Once you have that cylinder it's an incredibly high resolution,
incredibly rigid platform that can get to very high resolution, very high registration accuracy
because it's solid. It's completely fixed. Then that gets coated with ink into those engraved
hits, engraved to certain patterns. That ink gets metered off with a doctor blade and then it
gets rolled onto a substrate. You can get very efficient and very high quality ink transfer. This
works particularly well with more complicated solvent inks and more complicated inks. In
inkjet you have to engineer to form these drops. Here you don't. It's a much wider process
window for inks and also much higher throughput. To give you an idea, this prints at -- how
long does it take to get a page? To get a square meter would take you several minutes with a
typical inkjet. This runs happily at a meter per second and, in fact, it doesn't want to run slow.
It wants to run fast. The kinetics and the fluid wetting de-wetting processes run better the
faster you go, so this runs at meters per second, very, very high throughput, very high quality.
For example, there's cheap magazines and there's expensive magazines. For many decades I
think in the U.S. the most premium high-quality printing ever done in the U.S. was National
Geographic, pictures and National Geographic. That's all gravure and that was their claim to
fame because that is the highest quality graphic printing. What's the downside? We had to
make that great big laser metal engraved cylinder. It can run millions, just hundreds of millions
of imprints, but it costs thousands of dollars to make every single one of those cylinders. If
you're trying to print the newspaper every morning and you have to print 140 pages, you have
to make 140 gravure cylinders at 4:00 a.m. every morning, very expensive process. It's
relatively expensive for design changes, but once you're up and running, a very, very high
throughput process and very wide process window. We've done that. Someone is joining us in
Washington, done work showing gravure things like printed biomaterials. We can print
everything from proteins and DNA to OLED materials and demonstrate sort of printed light
emitting diodes off of this printing technique.
>>: [indiscernible] do you keep them alive?
>> Devin MacKenzie: Yeah, so that's the other thing. That's a good question. One of
the issues is, you can inkjet print proteins and what were live cells. They tend not to
survive because this is an extremely high shear process. There's a little piezo electric
driver that pops, ejects these drops and actually the piezo electric driver is constantly
running at 10 kHz or 30 kHz or in this range constantly and it's almost about to eject a
drop every time and then every time it needs to eject a drop it gives it a slight extra
boost. But what that means is that is like basically taking the solution and putting it in
an ultrasound bath continuously, and a very high ultrasound bath. This tends to
destroy, it'll even destroy things like carbon nano tubes, but organic molecules tend to
get ripped apart in this process. This is actually a much gentler process because the
material that actually gets wicked into the wells here, you scrape off the material, but
the material that is in the wells is never actually touched. In the fluid dynamics sense
when you are in contact with the rigid surface the velocity is zero at a wall. It may move
as you get further away, but it is essentially a very slow moving fluid. The fluid is not
moving. Everything else is moving really fast. This is much more tolerant and much less
shear of a process. You are able to have viable biomaterials whereas with inkjet you
may not be able to do that. This is a further example of a more complex process
integration of some of the kinds of things you can do with this sort of technology. The
inkjet printer use on the previous stage to print maybe electrode traces, there's some
capsulation, oxygen plasma step which is going to pattern an additional blade coding
deposition using wetting and de-wetting. Oxygen plasma through a mask locally
produces very high wetting areas and then the counter area is very de-wetting and then
you can literally scrape another ink across that of another material and it will essentially
de-wet off of the areas you don't want it and only wet the areas that have been made
hydrophobic by this oxygen plasma step, atmospheric step, not a vacuum step. And
then you build up and actually can build up additional hydrogel bumps onto this
process. The hydrogel is the wetting process that produces hydrogel bumps. This is an
impedance sensor array, so this is an array of hydrogel sensors and you are doing
impedance measurements for wound characterization. You can actually put it on a
wound and actually do impedance mapping of the wound and look at magnitude and
phase and correlate that with the damage through the image of the wound and image
potential wound healing. Imagine a future printed flexible device. Not only would you
be diagnostic but you would be therapeutic. You put it across the wound, but only part
of the wound actually needs the medicine. In fact, putting extra medicine can actually
slow down the healing of other parts at different times. In this way you could actually
sense the part that actually needs it. Say, for example, infection is a slightly different
impedance signal and a slightly different temperature signal, and then you can actually
locally released drugs just when you need it and actually end up with a combined -- this
is just the diagnostics part, but next generation will combine diagnostics and
therapeutics. This also brings in the first concept of flexible electronics, fundamentally
flexible. When do you need flexibility? You need flexibility when you put something in a
small space, but most importantly, you need flexibility when you start interacting with
the human body. There is no part of the human body that's flat and there's no part of
the human body that it's comfortable to have something that's not flexible in contact
with it for very long. We started thinking about integrated systems, how we bring all of
these components together. What I showed you before was an example of a sensor,
but it had a bunch of leads coming out because it has to be plugged into some sort of
reader or some other type of electronics. We start looking forward to completely
autonomous medical sensors. Imagine distributing medical sensors, tropical disease
sensors in the Third World. One of the issues with some of these outbreaks is they have
to go get samples, which is dangerous. They have to take those samples and ship them
back in a plane across continents to a lab where they can do the analysis. That adds
extra weeks of delay. It adds extra cost, extra complexity. If instead you actually had a
diagnostic like maybe a DNA-based diagnostic card, if you could read itself, very low cost
because it would not require an external reader. Another example, very interesting
device and Seattle has been part of this, is imagine future glucose meters. I think we'll
look back 50 years from now and look back at the very large fraction of the population
that is already diabetic and more will be, and the fact that you use to actually take and
stick yourself and bleed five times a day to test your blood. I think it will seem barbaric
to us 50 years from now that you actually do that. Think about all of the infection. It's
just crazy. But it's a very difficult problem. Imagine if instead you had a test, you had a
sweat-based sensor or the fluid of your eye-based sensor locally. Say imagine that
glucosamine, optical glucose meter. You can actually detect glucose level based on the
water in your eye, different chemical balance of the water in your eye. You know,
basically a glucose meter contact lens. How are you going to power that? How are you
going to drive those electronics? People talk about wireless. Are you going to put an RF
horn of to your face and charge it? That's not very popular. Are you going to put a rigid
lithium battery, which is a neurologically active and toxic substance on the surface of
your eye, in the body fluid? Not very likely. So we are thinking now about how do we
fully integrate systems, not just the sensor, maybe the flexible displays, but also how do
we power it? And how do we do the wireless connectivity? And as you saw before we
talk about the flexible hybrid electronics center? That's being funded by the federal
government through the Air Force Research Lab. The Air Force Research Lab wants this
yesterday. They want to monitor pilots. There is something like tens of thousands of
sensors on a Raptor fighter aircraft. This is $1 billion plane. There are zero sensors on
the pilot. Every single pilot is 28 years old. Pilots never, ever, ever refuse to fly. They
love to fly. They want to fly. If you ask them are you ready to fly? They always say yes.
It doesn't matter. They could be near death. They could be hung over for a week. It
doesn't matter; they'll fly. You are going to put them in control of a billion-dollar piece
of aircraft that could rain hellfire on millions of people in one shot. So they would like to
monitor the pilot . They want health sensors and performance monitoring sensors to
actually go on the pilots to know if they are ready to fly and then, of course, to know
that they are okay while they are flying. Because printed electronics and transistors are
not fast enough right now to do things like efficient RF transmission, we need to
hybridize that. We need to use silicon CMOS today, so we have to take silicon CMOS.
We have to thin it down maybe sub 10 microns and get it flexible and then integrate
that with the rest of the flexible devices so they can go into sort of a hybrid flexible
performance monitoring system. That's one of the missions of this flexible hybrid
electronics system that we are involved in. There are a lot of answers here. What's the
most important part? I'm biased. I started a company to do it. The most important
part of the system, what's the most important part of the system, my smart phone?
What's the most important part of this system? What's the most important problem
with this? It's the battery. It's time. You can pack a huge amount of functionality in
here, but it's always this great big brick is because you got to have a big enough battery
in order to do all of this stuff. Energy, and whenever you start talking about ultrathin
devices, they are going to be flexible enough. They are going to be 100 microns thin to
really be fully conformal in clothing around our body. The energy density plummets and
so energy, you're starved for energy. So the battery is very important. So we started
Imprint Energy as a printed flexible battery company both to exploit some of the special
chemistry, printable chemistry of zinc that is safe, non-toxic and low reactivity, so it can
handle it in air. That's good because we don't need to package it so much, so we can
make it there. It's also good because now we can print it, we can process it in air. We
can use new screen printing processes to print these batteries and we can print them as
flexible devices, ultrathin, only a couple of hundred micron thick devices onto foils and
make them very, very thin. The kind of applications, you think about the basic system.
What are the central components? Sensing information display, logic memory that
connectivity drives, all of these things. And we start thinking about interacting with the
human body and you have another special set of constraints, low toxicity. Companies
like Duracell. Duracell didn't make lithium batteries. They completely stayed out of
that. There's one reason why, because they make a huge amount of money selling zinc
manganese batteries and they are disposable batteries. There's another reason,
because the biggest market, target market was really lithium coin cells and lithium coin
cells, you don't hear about it much. They are already banned in California and other
places in things like audio cards and things like that and toys. You ever noticed that
when you buy a toy when you buy them at Christmas they all have a screw on them
now? You have to break out a screwdriver to open them up whatever happened to the
good old days with a quarter or the pop-up? The reason why is because it kills kids
because a lithium coin cell, a kid swallows a lithium coin cell, it gets stuck in their
esophagus and they have this hydroxide reaction and it burns a hole in their esophagus.
Once it happens, they can't stop it. There is a very high mortality rate. Duracell, very
early on decided they would not go with that. They had known that 10 years ago and
they decided as a company decision they would not go into that business because it was
related to mortality in kids. So toxicity is a big issue, especially if we start talking about
powering the smaller and smaller devices, smaller and smaller things that can end up in
harm's way. Things that are going to get banged, going to get knocked. We can't afford
to have lithium fires, things that are going to leak directly onto the human skin, things
are going to end up in your three-year-old's mouth and he's going to be chewing on it.
And all of these things are going to happen as we start integrating electronics into
everything from packaging, smart packaging, the internet of things packaging, to smart
Band-Aids to glucose meters and direct on body devices. And then other important
things like thinness and flexibility both in terms of cost, conformal integration, but also
in terms of comfort. Also sustainability in terms of a full lifecycle. We start talking
about medical devices packaging. FedEx already got into the RFID business, but they
would really like to be in the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth business because I don't want to have to
install these RFID readers. Everyone already has a Bluetooth and a Wi-Fi reader in their
pocket in every car in every building everywhere. If you could put a $.10 Wi-Fi tag on
every FedEx package you would do when your package came in the building. You would
know where was everywhere in the supply chain, but it has to be disposable. They don't
want to have to rip it up and recycle it. You can't dispose lithium batteries. It's also
transporting a large amount of lithium batteries is a hazardous materials transport, so
that also drove our decision to explore the printables ink system in Imprint Energy.
Basically, it's a five layer device built around this custom ionic liquid. It's sort of novel, a
replacement of all of the -- the problem with the lithium cell is you have the toxicity of
lithium, but you also have lithium is pyrophoric. It reacts with air. That silver bag that is
now black because they put black polyimide around it. It's still silver underneath the
black stuff in your iPhone battery or your Samsung battery. That bag is to keep water
and moisture out and to keep the lithium in. If water and moisture that in fast enough it
would start to smolder. So you have a spark we also have fuel the electrified lithium
batteries is an organic solvent. It's not that far from gasoline. Literally, it's a highly
flammable solvent. So you've got spark and you've got fuel. That's a difficult
combination. By moving to the zinc system we take away from the spark. It's not
pyrophoric. It's stable. But also we use these highly stable ionic liquid electrolytes that
are essentially inflammable and very low volatility. They have no volatility and very low
flammability. And we have to do special things to make them high enough ionic
connectivity, but we are also assisted by the fact that we are printing this as ultrathin
film so the transport distances are very small. In this way starting with some highly
engineered materials, very scalable printer processes including sheet based printing but
also roll to roll printing. We are currently doing roll to roll scale up in Sweden right now.
We can produce in high-volume relatively low cost high energy density flexible batteries.
One of the examples of the proof of this concept of doing this is actually to demonstrate
on a 12 1/2 micron nickel substrate to give you an idea of what 12 1/2 micron metal foil
is. Aluminum foil is like 50 or 100 microns and you know how flexible it is. It is
extremely flexible, extremely thin. We are able to demonstrate a thin-film batteries out
of I think about 5 square centimeters per battery with enough power to directly drive a
Bluetooth. This is a Bluetooth sort of handshaking. It's the power demand out the
battery side from a direct coupled Bluetooth wake up and a sort of preamble and
Bluetooth communication. It looks like nothing. You guys who work on micro
processing, this is a joke, 45 milliwatts. For a very, very small battery even a coin cell,
this is very difficult to deliver this sort of instantaneous power. But we work through
this sort of high surface area and nano-based printed cells. We are able to get actually
very high discharge rates and good power density, enough to demonstrate wireless
connectivity. We built various flexible devices and prototypes off of that. Ultimately,
the story comparing, these are lithium batteries, this is energy density versus cell
thickness. The actual energy density you see advertised for your sampling Galaxies and
iPhones is up here in the 400 watt hours per liter or 400 milliwatt hours per cubic
centimeter, but as they get thinner it drops off dramatically. The reason why is
packaging because regardless of the cell you still have to prevent the air, water and
moisture from getting in. In fact, the smaller the cell is the higher the surface to volume
is, so the more packaging per unit volume you need. As you get very then you actually
end up with no for battery anymore. These cell walls, this packaging is hundreds of
microns thick. If you want to make a flexible so you need to be hundreds of microns
thick. You have nothing but packaging. There's no space for lithium anymore. There is
no active material space, so actually the energy density of these things we are talking
about for flexible electronics energy is very low. When you move to the zinc system we
can already exceed today what they're doing in lithium polymer and it's largely about
the stability. There's a lot of smart engineering of all of these materials, but it's largely
about that packaging constraint. Because we're using printable air safe materials, we
don't need 200 microns of packaging on either side. We need 50 microns of packaging
because it's already air stable. It's not that moisture sensitive. And so overall we can
get the same very thin device a lot more active material per unit thickness of device, so
we can get a lot more energy. Now I'll sort of segue into the last couple of minutes, I'll
say a little bit about the activity at the University of Washington and the lab I am
building. I hope you can stay because this is my self-serving interest to get you
interested in what is happening. That's my lovely son. Clean Energy Institute. You saw
that was the Washington research for clean energy. The Clean Energy Institute really
comes from the governor in promoting energy economy in the State of Washington.
You may or may not know the University of Washington is a net producer of energy
through hydroelectric power and Pacific Northwest National Lab has been sort of world
recognized in grid storage technology, one of the world leaders in that area. And now
we're talking about with all the advanced materials, chemistry, nano chemistry at the
University of Washington, trying to take that and push that and bridge the gap between
sort of fundamental early-stage physics and materials science into advanced
manufacturing to actually make it impactful. The governor has actually been funding
the laboratory. He funded hiring me in the Washington Research Foundation funded
hiring me so this sort of straddles both worlds, the industrial entrepreneurial world of
trying to make things really work all the way back to the academic world of the
University of Cambridge and physics and electronics. So I can sit in both and help from
this process of going from sort of fundamental early-stage device physics and materials
to larger scale device prototyping trying to realize -- there are physicists who disagree
they are interested in the physics of this. In my heart I'm a physicist to. But the real
reason that these materials are interesting is because how you can make them. They
are only interesting if they can be scaled and impactful. They are otherwise not
interesting. We can already make a 45 percent efficient solar cell. Spectra lab owned by
Boeing makes these solar cells and they go on satellites. They are tens of thousands of
dollars per square meter, far too expensive, but the physics -- it's already known how to
make almost a perfect solar cell. The problem is you can't make it cheaply enough. In
terms of new solar materials, new energy materials it's not the fundamental can it be
done. It's how you can do it. Can you do it in a scalable sustainable we? So my lab and
the new efforts are all about translating from molecules to bench scale and even going
to pilot scale roll to roll processing. We're doing that and this is my lab we're building
up. We're calling it the Speed Lab, Scalable Printed Electronics and Energy Devices Lab,
where we have everything we are building in the University sense and I think probably
the U.S. is largest research roll to roll system, maybe in the world. It's being custombuilt for us in Denmark. The prototype systems being used to produce things like semi
transparent large area flexible solar arrays and things of that sort. We also have
capabilities to do rapid prototyping inflexible and printed electronics, of course, printed
battery energy devices, but also things like printed sensor arrays and other things for
flexible and conformal electronics. And this fits into the Washington Clean Energy Test
Beds, which is a further investment. The governor was really excited that we started
this program and so excited and so interested in getting reelected and making energy a
plank of his platform, that he further invested in this concept of scaling from academia
to industry in the Pacific Northwest so he started these clean energy test beds. My
partner and I, Gi Hu Hae [phonetic] is from GE electric vehicle division. He is a relative
new hire at University of Washington so industry experience in the battery space. And
then I come from the electronics industry, industrial research to lead the scale up and
characterization test bed where we're looking at translating both from the academic
side to larger scale. But also having hardware and equipment so that companies can
come in, solar industry, large-scale battery industry can come in and characterize
batteries, do environmental testing, do module testing, light soaking, de-characterize
and calibrate their modules and sort of collaborate with the University researchers to
try to foster more entrepreneurial, more energy industry development in the Seattle
area in the Pacific Northwest area. Right now we are building a lab. This is the Bowman
building. If you know University Village, if we jumped onto the back of this we would
jump into the back parking lot. It would be quite a drop, but you would jump into the
back parking lot of University Village. This is right behind University Village. It's called
the Bowman building. It's a huge shell like 20 foot high ceiling shell. This part over here
is being used by the aeronautical engineering department to fly drones around inside.
We're going to take that space and build sort of a print lab in a shell inside this shell
inside of there as our temporary lab. This is about a 4500 square seat facility with
everything from roll to roll coating to shoot based coating through to solar module
testing, large scale panel testing, large-scale battery testing with the idea of crossing
over and bringing industrial partners to do industrial research along with the academic
research. And we'll have that extensive array of deposition tools, but also
characterization tools. There's all the characterization will have, a lot of times that's
what industry doesn't have. They have something to make it but they don't have the
million-dollar electron microscope or special chromatography system, but the University
does. We're covering all of the characterization and sort of electrical test equipment
also with the analytical equipment in the University. We had the molecular analysis
facility which has extensive analytical capabilities and so for industrial partners working
in the lab, they also can get access to all the analytical capabilities across the University
in molecular analysis and device fabrication. And we are also coupled closely with the
WNF, which is the Washington Nano Fabrication Facility. We also have the ability to go
and hybridize and go back and forth between new printed electronics and thin silicon,
looking at new printed nano materials and combine that with traditional vacuum and
deposited wafer-based silica and in that Washington Nano Fabrication Facility that has
world class semiconductor processing tools. They get used by Intel and Micron and
people like that. With that I'll wrap up. Part of my mission in coming here is to let me
come and see what Microsoft is about, see what it's like over here and get a chance to
tell you about the exciting work that we're doing. But also see if there are ideas on how
we can work together and how we could start bringing local industry into these
laboratories that we are building on campus in this new printed electronics area. Thank
you very much. [applause]
>> Xiaodong He: We can take some questions.
>>: You mentioned the [indiscernible]. What kind of procedures are how do you
charge?
>> Devin MacKenzie: However we can. And so that's a good question. Right now we
are looking at multiple models. There is a fee-based model and that's true in the
Washington Nano Fabrication, WNF, and in the analytical facility. There's a certain
amount of time per hour on a particular instrument. So you sign up when you pay your
-- it's quite inexpensive, actually compared to having to obtain the tool. It's heavily
subsidized. But you pay at an hourly rate for how much you use an instrument and
there might be a technician or some sort of staff support if you need someone else to
run it for you or help support you, there is some sort of fee. But we are also looking at
joint programs where you can become a member of the center and or fund may be
shared research or there might be some support on the academic side and then that
academic side is doing research that you're interested in or is supporting your project.
So we are working out those mechanisms. One of the surprising things, I worked for the
University of California system. I worked in the University Cambridge system. I worked
in the Massachusetts Technology Institute in electrical properties. I can say that
University of Washington is the most flexible I've ever seen. That's a very good thing.
There's not a lot of strict absolutes. The governor wants this to happen. The University
wants it to happen, so we are pretty flexible. Right now it's fee-based, but we are also
looking at projects. An example case would be a very large aeronautics manufacturer to
remain unnamed. There's a potential that we would actually bring some of their
equipment into the lab. They would become a partner. They would provide some
investment but then they would actually literally place some of their tools in our lab and
they would use a combination of our tools and their tools and then they would have
access. So there's all kinds, every kind of possible -- right now nothing's not possible.
>>: [indiscernible] energy. What kind of product do you have on clean energy?
>> Devin MacKenzie: Again, the primary focus for hiring me was on energy related
devices, so we are looking at alternatives. We didn't talk enough about the solar cell
and the physics of solar cells, but we're looking at very low carbon footprint
manufacturing of solar cells. That's the primary driver for that roll to roll printing is that
it would actually be roll to roll processing high efficiency solar cells. That's where I
started in University of Cambridge was actually organic solar cells. At that time organic
solar cells were about 2 percent efficiency and we made at the time the world's highest
efficiency solution processed solar cell ever made. That was 2 percent. To date we're
talking about solution processed solar cells that are 20 percent, that's 10 x in 10 years.
But that's actually quite significant because now it matches or exceeds silicon modules,
so now you're talking about printable low carbon footprint to manufacture lowtemperature process solar. So that's clean energy. The other aspect of clean energy is
looking at things like grid storage to be more efficient but also non-lithium batteries
looking at less environmentally damaging battery systems. And so zinc-based batteries
or aluminum-based battery systems.
>>: What is the scale of time? How dense between circuits [indiscernible]
>> Devin MacKenzie: Not that dense and actually one of the hybridizations actually the
real focus, the biggest strength of the technology is where you need to do large areas.
We can do stuff, we can make features. One of the interesting things in solar, so we
work with an unnamed solar company that may become a partner of the center. We
are doing nano photonic patterning of essentially anti-reflection coatings and anti-falling
coatings for solar cells. They are not interested in making the cells better anymore. The
cells are almost theoretically to their maximum efficiency. We could spend hundreds of
millions of dollars in research and we might improve the cell efficiency by another
couple of tenths of a percent. We can put hundred x less investment into looking at
anti-reflection coatings that can be made with the right characteristics and a 25 year
lifetime that can increase the cell efficiency by two and 3 percent. In those cases we are
doing nano scale fabrication. We are talking about features in the hundred nanometer
scale features, but those are passive devices. They are simply photonic coatings, a
special two-dimensional like a structure for anti-reflection and super hydrophobicity.
Essentially, water can't wet it because the curvature is so high. But in terms of devices,
typically, there are some features you can get into the sub micron, but we are
particularly talking about micron scale features. Really where it shines is not that.
That's where the hybrid comes in. If you need to do a Bluetooth low-power Bluetooth, 5
milliwatt Bluetooth, you need silicon right now. So instead we don't try to do that, but
we do do the other things, flexible antennas. We do the batteries, flexible large area
batteries, sensors. Typically, sensor signal depends on the area of the sensor. Per-unit
sensor is looking very, very expensive, but we can actually make large area sensors,
optical sensors, biosensors and large area printing. I'm always trying to push it the other
way. Let's look at the big devices because those are the ones that are big. Those are
the ones that have to be flexible and that's what we're better at.
>>: Waterproof?
>> Devin MacKenzie: Sometimes they have water in them so they are one with the
water. And that's a good question. One of the biggest issues of the photo
[indiscernible] is how do you get it to last for 25 years? Twenty-five years is a really,
really long time. You think about something sitting on the roof, lots of UV, lots of
moisture. What's going to happen? Lots of water is going to fall on it, hail, snow. Algae
is going to grow on it. Fungus is going to grow on it. Birds are going to poop on it.
Twenty-five years is a very long time. Barrier films and the robustness of barrier films
that are compatible flexible is a big development area. Luckily, part of that has been,
part of that bleeding edge has already been blunted by the OLED, so you're seeing
flexible OLEDs come about. OLEDs have a similar, they have a much higher local
intensity of excitation but for a shorter lifetime. Your OLED for a flexible phone usually
last for two years. They want to buy a new phone every two years max. Apple would
prefer everyone year. But it's a much higher excitation density than a solar cell. They
managed to push that out and develop barrier films on flex that are getting there, but
that's an active area. That's something like industrial partnerships with 3M and people
like that who are in strong interest to be able to do that, to get those scalable barrier
films and use those for solar. And when you can't keep it out, then you live with it, so
we are also looking at sort of molecular routes to fixing that water, preventing it from
reacting with other parts of the device so we can stabilize it that way. But that's a good
question. Sometimes it doesn't matter. The batteries we try to make them moisture
intolerant but in the solar cell case we've got to keep the moisture out or trap it before
it does something bad and it has to be for 25 years which is a really long time.
>>: It wouldn't be such a long time but deeper. I'm an ocean engineer. So 5 or 600
meters?
>> Devin MacKenzie: Well, hydrostatic pressure, it depends on the type of device.
There's not like free volume. Usually that's a bad thing, so we try to give it a that. They
are still incompressible, so there are always tricks. There are always problems when you
come down to it, but fundamentally, I don't think that's a big limitation in terms of just
sheer pressure. Some actually good things happen in batteries, good things happen in
pressure usually.
>>: The type of batteries that you concentrate on our rechargeable batteries?
>> Devin MacKenzie: Both. Interestingly enough, the big milestone in the zinc polymer
case was that we were able to get recharge ability out of the zinc. Zinc and lithium
metal, you don't see a lithium metal battery. I don't know if you read much in the space
here but there silicon anode, silicon in batteries. People talk about it for Tesla and it has
actually happened. That's because they can't actually use pure lithium metal because
it's so reactive. Sony tried about a decade ago and Sony almost lost everything because
of failures of lithium metal batteries and the fires related to them. So they don't
actually use pure lithium metal. We can use -- and there are a couple of reasons. One is
because it's so reactive, but also when you cycle it, charge and discharge it, when the
lithium metal gets plated back to its source, when you recharge the battery, it doesn't
just go flat in a planar film. It actually builds a three-dimensional structure and those
grow each cycle and it gets closer. And the ones, as it grows, it accelerates the part
that's closest to the next electrode grows faster and shorts across the battery and leads
to a fire. Because of that electrolyte, that ionic liquid polymer electrolyte in the zinc we
are able to sort of suppress formation in zinc, which is limited rechargability in zinc
before, so that's part of the trick. So we went out with the big offering that we could
get rechargability out of zinc. It turns out the most exciting initial customers all want
single use batteries because they want it in medical devices and things like that, which
are going to get contaminated. They are either single use or limited recharge. Typically,
anything that goes on the body is not going to be there for more than a few days
because the adhesive is actually sticking to your skin cells and your skin cells are getting
shed. It's going to come off. It's going to get contaminated. You can't really sterilize the
rest of the electronics. It will just destroy the electronics anyway and it's too expensive
to sterilize anything anyway. No one wants to use a reused thing from someone else
anymore. So it needs to be disposable. So it might need to be charged if it's a daily use,
maybe three-days, maybe less than ten charge cycles, but it needs to be incineratable
and it needs to be non-toxic and all of those things. We went out with rechargability
but actually a big driver has been single use. There is a question in the back.
>>: I was just wondering, are you doing anything with processing power with very thin
electronics?
>> Devin MacKenzie: Through the flexible hydro-electronics center and with the work of
my battery company, we partnered with people like American Semi-Conductor doing
ultrathin silicon microcontrollers, so they're developing processes for that. In our sense
right now in our lab we are not focusing a lot on trying to make highly integrated logic,
but we do work with the thin silicon side and the designs are not just as trivial as just
taking the silicon circuit and thin it back. There are tricks in that processing, things you
can and can't do. So there are partners and we would certainly be willing and interested
to be working with other people who are thinking about large-scale integration in silicon
that can be thinned.
>>: I'm not talking about processing like data processing. I'm talking about power
processes, taking the power from these little thin batteries or whatever and converting
it to the right voltage so that some other device can use it.
>> Devin MacKenzie: That's definitely interesting. One of the things you fight is
convention. Convention people live with lithium batteries, 3.7 volts for a decade now.
And so these systems are designed to run off 3.7 volts and they don't actually need it,
and so a lot of times and we are developing these new applications we have to build up
battery stacks, multi-series stacks so that we can get to 3.7 volts then we find out that
they have been down converting it back down to one volt by the logic. So we obviously
want to cut right through that layer and drive direct. It would be more efficient. Types
of cells, some of the types of designs, like step up converters, even very, very good
engineers from some of the best wireless companies in the world think they just need a
peak of a milliwatt or 10 milliwatts or something. It turns out if you actually put it on a
scope when you look on the microsecond scale, there are huge power pulses that need
to bootstrap these circuits and get them started. And they don't care about it because
their circuits always run so they never worry about it. We worry about that. There can
be issues based on conventional approaches that assume certain peak power draws that
can't be had from these thin structures. So really efficient voltage converters and things
like that are pretty interesting and that's been an issue for us. One example is driving a
super power like Wi-Fi first radio. It needs really large instantaneous power, a watt or
something like that, but the way to do it, to run it off a tiny battery is you also use a
super cap, super capacitor, but you still need to charge up that super capacitor. And
some of those conventional circuits to do that have these immensely high inrush
currents. And initially, the very first sinusoid is really, really low voltage and really, really
high inrush current, that can actually shorten the battery and when the battery voltage
drops so low then the circuit doesn't latch up and you don't operate. So we've run into
those kinds of problems and tried to design, or get partners to design out sort of ones
that are powerful circuits that are tuned to these technologies. It's case-by-case, but it's
an interesting issue. It can be significant.
>> Xiaodong He: One last question before our guest leaves. Any questions?
>>: How large a modules can you test?
>> Devin MacKenzie: We are basing the system, it depends on which test you need. We
are able to fabricate, there's nothing in the new facility that won't do less than 300
millimeter, 12 inch, so every tool will do 12 inch or bigger. In some cases, like this is a
light soaking. This is huge. This is for full-size light soaking panels, so like huge solar
simulator source or UV source here and you can put panels on either side. I should
know the number but that's a standard size solar panel array and there are a couple of
like 3 foot by 6.
>>: That does a wide spectrum?
>> Devin MacKenzie: That there is a wide spectrum. There are various degrees of solar
simulations. It's actually really hard to simulate the sun exactly for the synthetic source
and there are various qualities. So it would be kind of like a single A solar simulator that
matches the spectrum to a certain percentage loss. For 300 we have a AAA which is the
best you can get, the closest match you can get, really spec, a source spectrum. But this
is really pretty good. This is industry-standard for doing large module light soaking.
There's also UV lamp.
>>: How low a wavelength does it go down to?
>> Devin MacKenzie: The AAA one is out to 1200 nanometer, which is pretty far. The
AA is maybe 800 is the farthest it would go. That's really important especially when
you're talking about new solar technologies because a lot of things can happen out at
these fringes that you don't normally see in silicon, like silicon [indiscernible] UV bang
gap. You don't worry about UV and stuff so much and you don't worry about deep IR
stuff. Some of these organics, there might be additional power that you can actually
harvest out of there that's in sunlight that the test is not seeing. On the other hand,
there could be additional damage that can be happening on the near UV end that silicon
doesn't care about and the standard test doesn't get. So we are definitely sensitive to
that. We're getting the highest specification broadest band solar simulation we can.
There's an interesting question about NREL certification. NREL is the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory. They are the de facto standard for solar testing.
Whenever you have a new solar cell and you want to claim that it's 18.3 percent
efficient the only time you believe it is when you get NREL certified. And so we're
planning to have our system calibrated to NREL, standard and have it cross calibrated
for cells and then potentially for modules have a certified to certify that this test will
adhere to the NREL standard for the testing modules. We haven't done that yet, but
that's our intention is to actually get NREL certification for the module, the big one, and
then sort of the NREL sort of cross-reference the cell-based one.
>> Xiaodong He: With that let's thank Devin for the exciting talk. [applause].