The Evolution of Electronics

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Event details

Date 12.11.2015
Hour 13:0014:00
Speaker Prof. Dr. Siegfried Bauer
Soft Matter Physics - Johannes Kepler University - Weiz, Austria
Location
Category Conferences - Seminars
Electronic devices advanced from heavy, bulky origins to smart, mobile appliances. The commercial landscape of today’s electronics industry is dominated by microelectronics, best reflected by ultrahigh density integrated circuits on rigid silicon. A new trend in electronics evolves from accompanying appliances to an imperceptible form, wearable as glasses, textiles and medical prostheses, directly adherent to the skin, or inner organs like the heart and the brain, establishing a seamless link between living beings and electronic devices. Flexibility, compliance, weight, and softness will be key metrics in next generation electronic appliances. Scientists currently explore the potential of elastic and soft forms of electronics, but also of robots and energy harvesters. The last few years have seen an explosion of such soft matter based demonstrators, so we are currently at the verge of witnessing the demonstration of truly complex bionic systems, eventually similar to the “machine-human” in the science fiction movie Metropolis or the sentient android Data in Star Trek. In the presentation, a few areas of this new branch of soft matter science will be highlighted.

Bio: Siegfried Bauer received the Master and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the Technical University in Karlsruhe in 1986 and 1990, respectively. In 1992 he joined the Heinrich Hertz Institute for Communication Engineering in Berlin, Germany. In 1996 he earned the Habilitation Degree from the University of Potsdam. In 1997 he became a Professor of Experimental Physics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Since 2002 he has been head of the Soft Matter Physics Department. Dr. Bauer's research is devoted to functional soft matter and its application to flexible and stretchable electronics and to energy harvesting. In 2012 Dr. Bauer was awarded with a European Research Council Advanced Investigators Grant.

Practical information

  • Informed public
  • Free
  • This event is internal

Organizer

  • The Institute of Microengineering (IMT)

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