Recent advancements and technological challenges in flexible electronics: mm wave wearable array for 5G networks

Electronic components today are all-pervasive and are progressing towards flexible structures. With the technological progression and their ease of use, these flexible electronic components are finding their way into more everyday utilities and industries than ever before. The key benefits of flexible electronics as compared to recent Silicon technologies are economical manufacturing and inexpensive flexible substrates like plastics, rubber and other flexible polymers which make it an attractive contender for next-generation customer products which involve lightweight, portable, flexible and low-cost electronics. Flexible electronics components consist of two layers with thin passive substrate like plastic, textile topped with another layer of active electronic components. Flexible material as a substrate can be used to design wearable antennas with different kind of conductive and dielectric materials. These materials are selected to offer reasonable quantity of mechanical deformations like bending, wrapping and twisting. The material should be least influenced under different weather conditions. In recent times, additional types of fabric/non fabric materials are being used for wearable antennas. This paper presents a detailed review of recent advancements and technological challenges in flexible electronics considering the upcoming materials and techniques and then further discusses amendable millimeter-wave (mm-wave) antenna arrays used for the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks for Ka-band.