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COSMIC project was a Large Scale Integrated Project  funded by the European Union in the Seventh Framework Programme.  The project was coordinated by Fraunhofer and included as partners CEA-Liten, ST-Microelectronics, TNO, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, IMEC, University of Catania, Technische Universität Berlin, Friendly Technologies Ltd.,Flexink Ltd., Polymer Vision BV and Plastic Logic Ltd.. The aim of the project was  to bring integration of organic electronics on a technology level that allows circuit integration on plastic films in flexible and large area fabrication. RF tags (silent tags), display line driver, A/D converter and ALUs are targeted as lead applications to demonstrate the progress in manufacturing technology.   
Technology development has been carried out on three different manufacturing platforms representing the different complexity and volume requirements in organic electronics. All of them are using flexible plastic films as substrate, but for very complex integrated circuits, like a line driver, a carrier based handling method is used, which forms the so-called wafer-to wafer (W2W) platform. On the other hand, for applications aiming at simple, but very large volume electronics a roll-to-roll (R2R) platform and in-between a platform working sheet-to-sheet (S2S) have been investigated. IMM, in colloboration with TU Eindhoven, University of Catania, and STMicroelectronics, worked on innovative circuit design of digital and analog building blocks, considering also design solutions adapted to organic material limitations and processing variations, including a thorough analysis of the contact effects in OTFTs. From experimental results new model parameters were extracted and included in design toolkit for complementary oTFT circuits. Furthermore, IMM extensively studied the device reliability, with particular attention to the bias stress effects that have been related to different phenomena.

The COSMIC project has moved organic electronics a truly big step forward both from an engineering and from a scientific perspective. There are still problems to solve but the project has well approached a point where this technology finds marketable applications, also beyond the classical lead applications.

Date: 
2010-01-01 to 2014-04-30