Introduction

Today, the interaction of human individuals with electronic devices demands specific user skills. In future, improved user interfaces can largely alleviate this problem and push the exploitation of microelectronics considerably. In this context, the concept of smart clothes promises greater user-friendliness, user empowerment, and more efficient services support. Wearable electronics responds to the acting individual in a more or less invisible way. It serves individual needs and thus makes life much easier. We believe that today, the cost level of important microelectronic functions is sufficiently low and enabling key technologies are mature enough to exploit this vision to the benefit of society. In the following, we present various technology components to enable the integration of electronics into textiles.

Wearable electronics go far beyond just very small electronic devices to wearable flexible computers. Not only will these devices be embedded in textile substrates, but an electronics device or system could ultimately become the fabric itself. Electronic textiles (e-textiles) will allow the design and production of a new generation of garments with distributed sensors and electronic functions. Such e-textiles will have the revolutionary ability to sense, act, store, emit, and move-think biomedical monitoring functions or new man-machine interfaces - while ideally leveraging an existing low-cost textile manufacturing infrastructure.

In the following, various technology components to enable the integration of electronics into textiles are discussed. Key elements are Photonic textiles using LED fabrics, a silicon-based micro-machined thermoelectric generator chip for energy harvesting from body heat, presented in Section 2, an interwoven antenna concept for RFID labels for the identification of textiles described in Section 3, application of nanotechnology in the development of CNT yarns and bio-sensing textiles.

Read Full Article

The author is associated with M/s. Arasan Creation, Erode.