Duration: 18 months
Printed electronics provide unique advantages aligned with the ESA Technology Strategy, such as reduced time to market, a simplified and local supply chain, and reduced costs. In particular, printed organic electronics offers advantageous production schemes for a variety of novel applications, from healthcare to security, and offers the possibility for rapid deployment of ad-hoc lightweight circuits or repair of damaged circuits. This vision is particularly relevant for reduced payload for long space missions, where supply of components might become troublesome. Yet, current printed organic electronics operate at low frequency, typically below 100 kHz, with exceptions up to few MHz. [1–3] GHioZa ambition is to expand the appealing vision offered by printed organic electronics to wireless printed devices by demonstrating for the first time organic transistors based on printable semiconductors operating in the Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) bandwidth (300 MHz – 3 GHz) and by assessing their robustness to space environment. In particular, GHioZa will exploit commercially available, printable organic semiconductors, namely carbon-based materials characterized by a higher level of sustainability with respect to other printable technologies, excluding the use of critical raw materials and contributing to technology independence. GHioZa has a wide impact potential for space applications, since it can serve in principle as a building block both for communication systems and wireless sensors. Therefore, GHioZa can be an enabling technology for easily deployable, cheap and distributed monitoring of space mission environments, as well as wireless wearable sensors to monitor health status of astronauts. At the same time GHioZa can pave the way to the application of printed electronics in satellite positioning systems operating in the L-Band (1 – 2 GHz), and in the longer term to explore its use in the field of satellite broadcasting, weather monitoring and air traffic control.
