Welcome! The National Centre for Flexible Electronics (NCFlexE) was set up as a Centre of Excellence at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2014 with financial support from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, and IIT Kanpur. The vision of this Centre is to catalyse the development of domestic industry in the field of large area flexible electronics, and this vision is being executed with the Centre serving as a bridge between the academic ecosystem and the industrial ecosystem.
Large area flexible electronics is an emerging segment of electronics that allows development of new applications by integrating intelligence in the form of electronics directly on flexible substrates such as plastics, paper, textiles or metal foils - and this opens up new possibilities of developing conformal, flexible, lighter and more robust applications. The emerging technology of flexible electronics is rapidly growing worldwide. India, on account of its strength in two critical areas - chemicals (ranked 6th globally) and printing (ranked 4th globally), is well positioned to realize the opportunity to develop as a global manufacturing hub for flexible electronics.
The activities in the Centre are undertaken by a Core Team comprising a group of multidepartmental faculty members who have been working in several aspects of large area flexible electronics for the past one and half decades, along with highly qualified and diverse group of Research Engineers focused on developmental work and a COO for the operations and commercialisation of the developed technologies. Most of the Core Team members have rich international academic and industry experience which they use to motivate a team of more than eighty technical personnel in various technology development and product commercialisation activities. The areas of activities include development of manufacturing inks, materials devices, circuits and integrated systems for various applications, such as displays, lighting, bio medical and other types of sensors, photovoltaic modules, cryptography and electronic security. The Centre is actively working with many local, national and international industrial partners for development of products; there are partnership models where the main mode of engagement is on the basis of co-development. The Centre’s activities are supported by labs with state of the art sheet to sheet printers and a 20 metre long custom-built versatile roll to roll printer. The Centre’s printing equipment and labs are open to the industrial project partners of the Centre for testing out product manufacturing at the initial stages of project deployment. The incubation facilities of IIT Kanpur are also open to those interested in setting up start-ups through NCFlexE for flexible electronic products.
The Centre conducts industry meets and road shows in different places, regularly participates in trade shows in India and abroad, and engages with different national and international industry associations. The Centre conducts an annual short course on Flexible Electronics, and also has collaborations with different national and international labs and academic institutions.
The Centre has embarked on a voyage to realize the potential of Flexible Electronics. Join us and be a part of this voyage!