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100 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 Next-Generation Flex Circuits: Elastic My experience in the flex circuit industry spans almost 40 years. Industry production volume grew exponentially during my career as circuit manufacturing shifted from North America and Europe to Eastern Asia. Japan was the manufacturing leader for the consum- er market, but that has spread amongst new companies in Taiwan, Korea, and China. The number of countries that manufacture circuits has expanded, but the basic construc- tion and manufacturing process remains the same. While circuit density is much higher, and automated processes lower manufacturing costs, circuit designers still use single-sided, double-sided, and rigid-flex constructions in their designs. Several new design capabilities are now available using flex circuits. They are revolutionary due to their unique performanc- es and cannot be created using traditional flex circuits. Let's look at some of these next-gener- ation flexible circuits. Wearable electronics and health care devices brought a need for elastic, flexible circuits. Tra- ditional flexible circuits are built on thin, flex- ible, plastic films, such as polyimide films and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) films. The standard construction of these flexible circuits allows them to flex over 10 million times and is the reason they are employed as the major wiring material for mechanical and electronic devices found in hard disc drives and inkjet printers. New applications from wearable and medi- cal devices demanded elasticity for circuits that attach to the human body. Traditional flexible circuits cannot satisfy the new requirements of EPTE Newsletter by Dominique K. Numakura, DKN Research LLC