Guest lecture: Route towards Flexible and Sustainable Electronic Devices

Among industries with the greatest environmental impact, such as textiles and construction, the electronics field plays a crucial role, with the use of rare-Earth elements, and materials with low recycling rates (i.e. plastics). As a matter of fact, the integration of electronic devices on everyday objects, known as the Internet-of-Things (IoT), and the continued evolution of Silicon-based electronics for faster, higher-performance systems, is contributing to the creation of a considerable amount of electronic waste (e-waste). Here, I present materials and fabrication methods to realize a wide variety of flexible and green electronic devices, such as sensors, Transistors and circuits, for sensor conditioning and smart textiles. In addition, customized end-of-life strategies (i.e. recyclability) will be shown, to demonstrate possible venues and strategies for the implementation of circular and environmentally-friendly electronics.

Biography

Giuseppe Cantarella is a Tenure-Track Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UniMoRe), Italy. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in 2018. He was Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy). Until October 2022, he served as an Assistant Professor in the Flexible Electronics Laboratory at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy). Dr. Cantarella is principal and co-investigator in international projects in collaboration with different European leading universities and research institutes. He has served on the technical program committees for a number of prestigious conferences including European Materials Research Society (E-MRS), IEEE International Conference on Emerging Electronics and IEEE International Flexible Electronics Technology Conference. To date, he has published over 100 papers in peerreviewed journals and conference proceedings.