Design of Fully-Printed Organic Circuits on Plastic Foils for Wireless Systems

This work is dedicated to the design of fully-printed organic circuits on plastic foils. Passive ring mixers, diode-based active envelope detectors and a flash analog to digital converter are presented. The circuits based on N-type and P-type transistors are manufactured using an organic sheet-to-sheet process in ambient air. The fully-printed active envelope detector based on nine transistors and a capacitance shows better performance than the one described in the literature. The detector is able to perform with different waveforms of AM-modulated signals under a +/-20 V supply voltage for a 40 kHz carrier frequency. It still performs correctly for a modulation depth of 10%. The passive ring mixers only use four transistors and are able to mix a 5 Hz modulating wave with carrier frequencies from 100 Hz until 2 kHz. The analog to digital converter is designed with 45 transistors and four screen-printed carbon resistors for a total surface of 760 mm(2). The circuit converts a 20 Hz analog input signal into a digital 2-bit output code under a +/-20 V supply voltage. All presented circuits are simulated before the realization and their measurement is performed in ambient air.