The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) chose the Flex Tech Alliance, of which Binghamton University is a founding partner, as America’s first Innovation Institute for Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing (FHE MII).

“The Flex Tech Alliance and Binghamton University have been leaders in the advancement of flexible electronics manufacturing for nearly a decade,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger said. “This latest news is an extraordinary affirmation of the work being done by the Alliance and of the work being done by our own researchers here on campus.”

“Flexible hybrid electronics use both traditional chips as well as printed electronics on plastic, thin glass, paper and fabric materials that can bend. Applications include bandages that can sense when the wound they’re covering is infected, as well as wearable patches that monitor human performance,” said Mark Poliks, professor of systems science and industrial engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

Other FHE applications include: health monitoring patches, medical devices, sensors, imaging systems, prosthetic devices, energy storage and energy harvesting devices.

The funding, announced Friday, will create the third federal center within Binghamton’s Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center (S3IP) and build on the University’s capabilities in electronics packaging and roll-to-roll manufacturing.

“Flexible electronics research is an example of what Binghamton University does best,” said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and director of S3IP. “This campus has a strong history of bringing academia and industry together to produce innovations that benefit society. We can’t wait to get to work with our partners.”

As part of the New York node, Binghamton University will work with New York state companies including Corning, Inc., i3 Electronics, General Electric and Lockheed-Martin to develop and manufacture this new technology. More companies are expected to join the initiative. Cornell University and the SUNY Network of Excellence in Materials and Advanced Manufacturing, representing all four SUNY research campuses, are also expected to participate.

The New York node will work closely with the Flex Tech Alliance to develop roadmaps and project plans. Selected projects are expected to begin early in 2016.

A handful of academic and private-sector jobs are expected to be created in the first two years of the program, with the potential for hundreds of new jobs coming online when new manufacturing initiatives hit the production stage.

The University and its partners will work to develop and then transfer advancements in flexible electronics from the lab to the commercial market. Binghamton and its collaborators have already experienced manufacturing successes and many more are expected to result from this investment. Some of the successes so far include: electronic packaging and reliability, thermal interface materials, thin chip-on-flex electronic systems-in-package technology, power conversion electronics packaging, biomedical and diagnostic electronics, human performance monitors, sensory systems, thin flexible glass for use in flexible electronics and displays, and functional glass surfaces, such as arrays of transparent antennas and touch-sensitive surfaces.

This new institute is part of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation program (NNMI). The FHE MII is the seventh MII announced — the fifth under DOD management. The NNMI program is an initiative of the Obama administration to support advanced manufacturing in the United States. Each institute is part of a growing network dedicated to securing U.S. leadership in the emerging technologies required to win the next generation of advanced manufacturing.

The DoD leadership team includes technical direction from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST).

Bridging the gap between applied research and large-scale product manufacturing, the institutes bring together companies, universities, academic and training institutions and federal agencies to invest in technology areas that benefit the nation’s commercial and defense interests.

Seokheun “Sean” Choi developed an inexpensive, bacteria-powered battery made from paper, he writes in the July edition of the journal Nano Energy.

The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid. “Dirty water has a lot of organic matter,” Choi says. “Any type of organic material can be the source of bacteria for the bacterial metabolism.”

The method should be especially useful to anyone working in remote areas with limited resources. Indeed, because paper is inexpensive and readily available, many experts working on disease control and prevention have seized upon it as a key material in creating diagnostic tools for the developing world.

“Paper is cheap and it’s biodegradable,” Choi says. “And we don’t need external pumps or syringes because paper can suck up a solution using capillary force.”

While paper-based biosensors have shown promise in this area, the existing technology must be paired with hand-held devices for analysis. Choi says he envisions a self-powered system in which a paper-based battery would create enough energy — we’re talking microwatts — to run the biosensor. Creating such a system is the goal of a new three-year grant of nearly $300,000 he received from the National Science Foundation.

Choi’s battery, which folds into a square the size of a matchbook, uses an inexpensive air-breathing cathode created with nickel sprayed onto one side of ordinary office paper. The anode is screen printed with carbon paints, creating a hydrophilic zone with wax boundaries.

Total cost of this potentially game-changing device? Five cents.

Choi, who joined Binghamton’s faculty less than three years ago as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, earned a doctorate from Arizona State University after doing undergraduate work and a master’s degree in South Korea. Choi, who holds two U.S. patents, initially collaborated on the paper battery with Hankeun Lee, a former Binghamton undergraduate and co-author of the new journal article.

Choi recalls an actual “lightbulb moment” while working on an earlier iteration of the paper-based batteries, before he tried the origami approach. “I connected four of the devices in series, and I lit up this small LED,” he says. “At that moment, I knew I had done it!”

Devices like cell phones and wireless printers compete to communicate within a finite spectrum, accessing different portions in order to transmit data. In the same way that overlapping radio frequencies can sound fuzzy and unclear, when these wireless signals overlap, none of them can communicate efficiently.

Azizjon “Isaac” Saliev, a senior electrical engineering major, says his goal is to ensure clear communication by using specific frequency ranges more efficiently. The problem is that the rise in wireless technology happened so quickly, that the frequency spectrum that had been thought to be inexhaustible became scarce. That’s pushing engineers to create better algorithms, methods and techniques of wireless data transmission.

“This field of study is relatively new,” Saliev says. “We used to think we had an unlimited amount of frequency domain.”

Saliev and his colleagues are trying to solve this problem by using cognitive radio networks (CRNs). These CRNs will automatically detect the available network, and transmit their signal using the available unoccupied space, rather than overlapping with other signals. His approach is to create an algorithm to detect the specific frequencies that devices are signaling. This information would be helpful when applied to emergency communications, where the efficiency of a radio signal could mean the difference between life and death.

Saliev left Uzbekistan five years ago to pursue an education at Binghamton. Today he’s such a dedicated student that his biggest fear about a recent snowstorm was that it would keep him from his linear algebra class. He is one of the first students at Binghamton to work on this project, sponsored by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation and headed by Xiaohua Li, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Li says it was a combination of Saliev’s class rank, previous research experience and ambition that made him the ideal candidate for this project. That ambition goes a long way in Li’s lab, where he called on Saliev and his partner to create the test bed for the experiment. “I asked them to set up a communication system using cognitive radio devices,” Li says.

Saliev and his partner had to complete extensive Internet research and make their own software, developing a test bed that allowed the project to proceed.

In addition to the work he is doing in Binghamton, Saliev spent a summer in Taiwan, where he conducted research for Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect. He developed two simple games in which the players use their bodies to control the on-screen movement.

Saliev plans to seek a doctorate in electrical engineering after he graduates, and he already has a job as an integration engineer at IBM starting this summer.

“In the long run,” he says, “I want to be an entrepreneur, and maybe open up my own start-up or consulting firm for the technology industry. My ultimate goal is to share my knowledge with others and make the world little better than it is today.”

Isaac Patka, a sophomore studying electrical engineering, began researching the efficiency of solar cells last summer at Columbia University’s Lab for Unconventional Electronics (CLUE). At CLUE, Patka also developed kits for an upper-level class to use in a lab studying displays such as the electroluminescent display, used in backlights of digital watches, and LED screens used in cell phones.

“My role in that was to look at the lab kits that they currently have and to improve them,” the Albany native says. “Some of their circuit boards weren’t working so I designed a new circuit.”

Patka’s work at CLUE included studying organic LED displays. Organic electronics use small organic molecules that behave like a semiconductor, the electricity-conducting material that Patka describes as the “basis for how all electronics work.”

“The organic materials are easier to process, easier to work with in a lab, and they’re a lot cheaper,” Patka says. “The No. 1 focus that I want to get more into is improving the efficiency of organic solar cells, and there are a lot of different ways that you can do that.”

At Binghamton, Patka has begun that focus in a research group under the direction of Peter Borgesen, a professor in the systems science and industrial engineering department. Last semester, Patka learned how to perform stress tests to evaluate the durability of the layers of organic solar cells.

“The overall goal is to produce solar cells with a good balance between cost, efficiency and long-term reliability,” Borgesen says. “I work with both juniors and seniors, but Isaac is the first to approach me already as a sophomore, and I am impressed.”

Patka plans to continue researching organic solar cells with Borgesen’s group, and he would also like to work with Binghamton’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP) to investigate the properties of solar cells. “What I would like to do is work with fabricating solar cells for the CASP and do some characterization or improve the fabrication process,” he says.

Improving solar cells can help military operations, researchers far from a grid power source and people in regions such as central Africa that lack adequate sources of energy. “I think it’s important because as the technology is improved and as it will get cheaper and cheaper, it will be able to provide people away from the grid a source of power,” Patka says.

Patka says a week-long program at the U.S. Naval Academy inspired him to become an engineer. “We got to tour some of their research labs,” he says, “and that just got me interested in technical things, and development of research and building practical things.”