Dylan Richmond, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Materials Science and Engineering Program, conducts research focused on identifying innovative materials and processes to produce reliable, low-cost, low-waste flexible electronic devices. His research group prints and builds circuits onto adaptable plastic materials.

“My favorite part of this work is definitely printing the materials and making something go from a design to an actual circuit and then building upon that and making the whole device,” Richmond says.

He has worked with Binghamton’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing, or CAMM lab, for two and a half years. The laboratory is directed by Mark Poliks, a SUNY distinguished professor of systems science and industrial engineering. Richmond works alongside Poliks on several projects.

“Dylan is a highly motivated individual who is always willing to accept new and challenging responsibilities,” Poliks says. “It has been my privilege to see him develop into an independent professional scientist.”

The CAMM produces devices that are made to withstand high temperatures and large influxes of energy. They can flex onto virtually any curved surface seamlessly, all while adopting the flexibility of a Band-Aid.

In traditional electronics manufacturing, copper or another conductive metal coats the entire plate and excess materials are etched away to leave behind the circuit. However, the CAMM focuses on printing through additive manufacturing. This process reduces waste and is a cost-effective alternative.

“In additive manufacturing, you only print what you need,” Richmond says. “So you print just the design of the circuit.”

While growing up in Owego, Richmond favored the complex nature of math and science over all other elementary subjects. His initial curiosity and appreciation ultimately paved the way for his future as an engineer.

During his final year at SUNY Oswego, where he received his bachelor’s in physics, Richmond had an opportunity to conduct research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on perovskite solar cells. Perovskite is a low-cost, high-energy material that can be used to power electronic devices.

Flexible hybrid electronics combine printed electronic circuits and the flexibility of plastic materials with the efficiency of thinned semiconductor devices to produce a new form of electronics.

“Flexible electronics should be able to adapt to locations and environments where they are needed. The key word here is adapting,” Richmond says. “You want them to not be a nuisance to you. You want to barely notice that they’re on you. So the challenge is making them so thin, so light-weight, so that you barely notice that you’re wearing them and they’re not getting in the way of your daily activities.”

Printed electronics are still novel and fundamental work still needs to be done. As the field of materials science gains more traction, Richmond says that he is less interested in competition and more interested in sharing his knowledge with like-minded peers in the engineering community.

“There’s a lot of people that are interested in this right now, and I just want to contribute to it,” he says.

The influence of the Green Revolution has motivated Richmond to hope for a future in the renewable energy sector. He aspires to combine his knowledge and experience in materials science with his passion for printing and green energy, to create his own renewable energy company in the future.

“Many of our projects involve collaboration with colleagues at major corporations and other universities,” Poliks says. “Dylan has had the opportunity to develop the skills needed to work in a complex team environment. As a result he is now well prepared to work in a highly competitive research and development laboratory.”

Along the way, he took an internship in Germany, co-founded the College Progressives, built a wheelchair for a cat and conducted research in the clean room at Binghamton’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

“A lot of people say, ‘Follow your passion.’ I mean, there’s a point to that,” Cadwell says. “But for me, I’ve considered college like a financial investment. I should evaluate what the return would be. That’s partly why I chose engineering. I also thought technology was a really good way to make a large impact on the world, from a humanitarian perspective. I did do something I was interested in, but I was also concerned with making sure I can do something that’s marketable.”

Cadwell decided to go to a SUNY school after his physics teacher at Whitney Point High School told him about the New York State STEM Incentive Program, which provides tuition awards to New York residents attending college in state. He settled on studying electrical engineering at Binghamton with the idea that he could one day design solar panels or medical equipment.

As a sophomore, Cadwell took a class on semiconductors and began learning more about the intersection of engineering and materials science. He enjoyed the subject so much that he served as a course assistant for that class as a junior.

He learned about the CAMM when it appeared on a list of possible senior capstone projects. Every project was given a budget, but that one was listed with zero dollars.

“Now I know they’re not going to give us a project that has no funding,” he says. “So I was thinking that maybe that’s a blank check. Maybe this project has a lot of money and a lot of importance. And I was kind of right about that because we easily spent a few hundred dollars on that project.”

CAMM researchers create flexible electronics by printing with metals on plastics using a roll-to-roll system. The CAMM is also the New York node of NextFlex, a federal initiative to advance flexible hybrid electronics manufacturing, and home to the Center for Flexible Hybrid Medical Device Manufacturing, designated a Center for Advanced Technology by the state.

Cadwell’s senior design group, working under the direction of CAMM Director Mark Poliks, built an inspection platform for use at the CAMM that relied on lights and a microscope camera to detect scratches or dust on rolls of printed electronics.

“One of the challenges is that once you deposit the metal or the insulator, you need to inspect it to see if it’s clean enough,” Cadwell says. “And if you’re patterning wires onto these rolls, you would also want to check and see if the wires are well-formed or if one of the wires is not connected.”

The experience opened new doors for Cadwell, who decided to continue at Binghamton for a graduate degree. The choice was made easier when he received support through the National Science Foundation’s S-STEM Scholarship (Scholarship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Program.

With help from Poliks, Cadwell also lined up a three-month internship at Applied Materials in Germany the summer after he finished his undergraduate work.

As a grad student, Cadwell’s research focused on printed radio frequency (RF) electronics. “That’s basically anything wireless,” he says. “Like Wi-Fi radio or anything that you might think of with the Internet of Things or smart appliances.”

Applications could include tags on products so a retailer could have a complete inventory of everything in a store at any given moment. Printed RF sensors could also be attached to a bridge or an airplane to make it easier to monitor vibrations. Such sensors are expected to make it easier and less expensive to monitor patients’ heart rates on a continuous basis, too.

Some of Cadwell’s projects with Poliks involved creating simple radio frequency components using aerosol jet printing. The process is akin to the inkjet printers found in many home offices, though it requires far more precision, and the researchers are using silver nanoparticles rather than the kind of ink you’d get at Staples.

The group created RF components including antennae using metals printed on plastics. These flexible components’ performance was measured, with promising results.

“Once we confirm that we can make the components, then we can put the components together to make devices,” Cadwell says. “But first, we wanted to verify that the components would be able to perform well enough.”

Scott Miller, director of technology for NextFlex, says Cadwell was a critical part of the DataCube project undertaken by Binghamton University, NextFlex and other partners in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“Ryan’s leadership has been clear in the project from the time he joined,” Miller says. “He has demonstrated technical expertise as well as the ability to plan and organize work and collaborate with a diverse team.”

Cadwell accepted a position with a design division of Anaren/TTM just before the coronavirus pandemic began and moved to Syracuse so he could begin work in July.

Anaren makes electronic components for companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The firm’s radar and satellite communications technology has military applications; customers also include cell phone companies.

Poliks, empire innovation professor of engineering, worked in industry for decades and says Cadwell is well prepared for the job. “It has been a privilege to work with Ryan over the last three years,” Poliks says. “He developed expertise in radio frequency design, modeling, fabrication and testing and made significant contributions to several of our research programs.”

The new center, to be known as FlexMed, will assist with job creation through the development and commercialization of technologies in New York state. FlexMed will be a part of the University’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

The FlexMed CAT will allow researchers at Binghamton University and our industry partners to build on more than a decade of experience in designing and manufacturing flexible electronics, said Mark D. Poliks, empire innovation professor of engineering and director of the new center. Poliks also serves as director of the CAMM, the official New York node of the national NextFlex manufacturing institute.

“We have unique facilities and expertise in partnering with industry that will enable us to make contributions to New York companies’ R&D right away,” he said. “This investment, combined with our ongoing work with NextFlex, establishes us as a major resource for large and small firms that are interested in flexible, wearable medical and industrial devices.”

Poliks, author of more than 100 technical papers, holds 47 U.S. patents. He envisions the center working with startup companies around the state to develop prototype devices in a cost-efficient and timely fashion so that they can be brought to market as quickly as possible. Initial projects may include wearable biosensors embedded in textiles and roll-to-roll manufacturing of electronic glass and ceramic surfaces.

The center, an interdisciplinary effort with collaborators at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, will offer training, workshops and academic classes. “As an educator, I’m also excited about the workforce development aspect of this center,” Poliks said. “Students at Binghamton and at SUNY Poly will have opportunities to learn state-of-the-art techniques and will be prepared for careers in this vital and growing economic sector when they graduate.”

FlexMed will serve as the nucleus of a manufacturing industry cluster in the quickly emerging field of medical and pharmaceutical device manufacturing, said Howard Zemsky, Empire State Development president, CEO and commissioner. “It will enable industry partners to scale up flexible-hybrid electronics technologies and present them to the marketplace more quickly, while harnessing various academic capabilities for product development and commercialization, workforce development and job creation efforts for New York state,” he said.

Flexible medical devices could include lightweight sensors for use in monitoring hospital patients, athletes and members of the armed services.

Harvey Stenger, president of Binghamton University, said FlexMed will build upon the campus’ strengths in engineering and the health sciences. “Our laboratories in Endicott and at the Innovative Technologies Complex are truly state of the art,” he said. “FlexMed will contribute to the Southern Tier’s rich culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Binghamton, which recently earned a “very high research” classification from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, is cultivating faculty teams to pursue large-scale center grants like this one, said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton University. He noted that the campus is also home to another CAT, the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center.

“Mark Poliks is an exceptional researcher, and his decades of experience in working with teams of faculty members and industry partners will be a tremendous asset to FlexMed,” Sammakia said. “This center will work on technology that has the potential to benefit society and improve healthcare in important ways.”

Flexible electronics are exactly what they sound like. Current technologies include curved-screen phones and computer monitors. Eventually, consumers could see a flexible iPad in stores.

Tomlinson, a junior majoring in physics and mathematics, is involved in the Smart Energy research stream of the Freshman Research Immersion program (FRI), where he started this work by trying to reproduce flexible heterojunctions.

A heterojunction is the basic component of a thin film transistor, which has applications in LED lights and other electronic devices.

Most heterojunction materials crack when they are bent, which disrupts the flow of electricity. Finding heterojunction materials that can bend without cracking allows for the creation of flexible electronics.

This has already been accomplished; Tomlinson’s research builds upon earlier work. His efforts helped to refine the fabrication of a novel material for a piece of the junction.

Tomlinson then conducted research last summer to identify the hurdles that come with fabricating these junctions to set a strong foundation for further research by future FRI students.

“The incoming group of FRI students now working on this project are exploring a novel material that is very similar, chemically, to the one I explored over the summer,” Tomlinson says. “My research has made it so that the same model and parameters should work for this new material that they’re doing the research on.”

The applications also extend to solar panels.

“An LED is the opposite action to a solar cell; a solar cell absorbs light and an LED emits light,” Tomlinson says. “So you can have flexible solar panels that are easier to place than just the regular ones.”

Tomlinson, who grew up around the Finger Lakes, has been passionate about the sciences since high school. He was attracted to physics and math by the challenge of both subjects. “I’m drawn to the mysteries surrounding physics and how it fundamentally describes the world around me,” he says.

Marissa Civic, research assistant professor for the Smart Energy FRI stream, highlights Tomlinson’s dedication. “Peter is a strong student, very interested in science, and enjoys doing research,” she says. “Peter volunteered to do summer research in my lab; he spent hours a day in the lab working on his project as it interested him.”

Tomlinson also enjoys hiking, canoeing, camping and running. In high school he was on the cross country and track teams. “I enjoyed the exercise and being part of a team,” he says. “I now run recreationally and enjoy the days I can meet up with BU’s running club.”

Tomlinson says the flexible electronics project left him with a curiosity about other kinds of research. “I spent two years or so on the FRI project, and I want to get the most out of my college experience,” he says. “I think it would be exciting to explore new research opportunities.”

Jeffrey Mativetsky, assistant professor of physics, will receive more than $525,000 over five years for the work, which is to begin in July 2016. His research centers on the relationships between nanoscale structure and electrical function in organic materials for solar cells and electronics.

“One of the main things holding back the use of solar cells is the cost associated with them,” he says. “Organic solar cells provide a pathway toward low-cost, clean energy. Organic materials open new possibilities because they are lightweight and mechanically flexible, making it possible, for example, to integrate them into curved surfaces.”

Organic materials can also be processed near room temperature, Mativetsky notes, which is another factor that makes them attractive for flexible electronics.

Mativetsky, who blends principles of physics, chemistry and engineering in his research, says he’s motivated by a desire to work on systems that are relevant to society. He’d like to see solar cells integrated into disaster relief tents, for instance.

In his laboratory, students work at a 16-foot-long, nitrogen-filled glovebox as vacuum pumps vibrate and several solutions swirl in vials on a countertop stir plate. The glovebox maintains an environment a bit above atmospheric pressure, with less than 1 part per million of oxygen and humidity. Mativetsky has two atomic force microscopes, and his team uses additional equipment at Binghamton’s Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory.

Mativetsky received seed funding through Binghamton’s Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence program, which encourages work across multiple fields of inquiry and counts smart energy as a special area of interest. The preliminary results obtained by Mativetsky with fellow Binghamton physicist Joon Jang and chemist Alistair Lees provided a foundation for the NSF proposal. “We made it to the start line,” Mativetsky says. “Now we can do the research we set out to do.”

The core of that research will focus on molecule-based nanowires, filaments that are far, far thinner than a human hair and which often have special properties not found in materials at larger scales. Mativetsky is especially interested in how electric charge moves through these nanomaterials.

“We’re investigating the fundamentals of how nanoscale structuring affects charge photogeneration and charge transport,” he says.

Mativetsky believes these nanowires could improve organic solar cell performance and enable the manufacture of flexible solar cells that are thinner than a sheet of paper. Such solar cells might be less efficient than traditional ones made with silicon, he says, but they could produce more energy per gram of material.

Mativetsky, a native of Montreal who earned a doctorate in physics from McGill University in 2006, held post-doctoral fellowships at the Supramolecular Science and Engineering Institute in France and at Princeton University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2012.

He is already the recipient of another $300,000 NSF grant, which supports research into graphene oxide with potential applications in flexible electronics, energy storage, sensors, composite materials and biomedical engineering.

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.