[Harish Subbarman Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering] The work that I and my students are working on is printed electronics. And the goal of this field is to be able to replace digital electronics in areas where you care about lightweight or conformal behavior.
[David Estrada Associate Professor, Materials Science] What I would like people to know about the work that we’re doing in printed flexible electronics here Boise State University is that we are recognized national leaders in the field. Flexible electronics is gonna have a lot of applications across multiple industries. For example, we’re working in the defense industry. We have interests from the biomedical industry. And, the nuclear industries in our printed and flexible electronics here at Boise State. The market is projected to reach at least 20 billion within the next 10 years. We’re poised, well poised to impact multiple of those sectors. So, a lot of the commercially available inks for printable electronics are limited in physical properties. We are trying to advance materials innovation for this field and develop novel functional materials that can enable new devices for printable electronics.
[Harish Subbarman] A typical, like space application or any airborne application. The key aspect of that is to reduce weight. Because, weight translates to an increase in cost, fuel, and stuff like that.
[Jacob Manzi Graduate Student, Electrical Computer Engineering] Here, like, first semester, I got to start training on equipment and I just gotta see what other people are doing and kinda, like, start learning that way. And then, already this far into the semester I’ve started doing my own research and conducting experiments on my own. Just like, sort of, building that rep for an eventual dissertation. And, a lot of schools you have to take like the one to two years classes before you can start doing your research. So, it’s just like so cool to be able to one be in a lab where I’m getting hands on experience with stuff that’s not related to my research. And then, kinda have that compare and contrast where I’ve already started doing things even in my first year.
[Jasmine Cox Senior, Electrical Engineering] I work on the flexible printed electronic side of things. But, I work on, like gas sensors. As well as, I’m starting to work on making inks for printed sensors and printed designs in general. It doesn’t seem like it when you’re just working on one small part of it. But being part of a bigger project you find out how things really work in the industry. Or, how things can apply to the bigger world and all that.