Public Funding for Flexotronix Limited

NFC-4-COVID-19 aims to increase the manufacturing rate of NFC flexible circuit boards from 10,000/hour to over 400,000/hr using advanced manufacturing processes which are typically used in the food packaging and printed label industry. The step change in manufacturing rate of NFC circuits and their inclusion in each COVID-19 antibody diagnostic device for home testing allows critically important pandemic mapping data to be available in the cloud for analysis within seconds. This is essential to establish a significant sample size for robust statistical analysis to allow governments to take the correct action quicker to control the spread of the disease throughout the population and to allow informed decision to be made on when lock-downs should be enforced or removed. NFC-4-COVID-19 provides one part of the solution to pandemic management, where antibody tests are distributed through postal services to every citizen and following simple instructions allows a test to run and the test data immediately sent to a secure cloud based data management and dash board system. Without NFC connectivity other forms of data transfer are needed to transfer data from the diagnostic to a SMART phone and then to the Cloud. Optical techniques suffer from poor signal to noise, whilst dierect electrical sensing is more robust. The later is the preferred approach for COVID-19 antibody tests. The project builds on proprietary materials and manufacturing methods developed for long range RFID tags and labels and applies these to make smart phone readable labels and devices. The extreme production rate will enable point of need diagnostics to be developed which immediately transfers sensor data, geo-location and user information to the Cloud for analysis and display by artificial intelligence algorithms, distributed ledger, blockchain and other Cloud Computing platforms, such as Microsoft Azure. In addition, the unique multi-layer process will be more sustainable allowing more complex circuitry to be produced on smaller circuit boards which use less material. Such advances will allow very compact distribution track and trace labels to be produced which may log the environmental temperatures and humidity seen by sensitive goods during storage and distribution.

The project objective is to develop and inetgrate new and sophisticated materials and processing techniques for which there is a latent demand in the healthcare and industrial markets where new low cost digitally connected flexible electrical circuits can give improved performance characteristics for technical and commercial advantage. Ultimately a high productivity and high profitability integrated manufacturing process will convert 2D nanomaterials into components which enable a broad range of unique novel life changing digitally connected lighting and sensor based products. Flexotronix Ltd will work with Harman Technology, Synergy Devices and Nottinghsam Trent University to create advanced ink formulations. Flexotronix will print multilayers of ink on thin plastic sheet. Deposited layers will be patterend by M-SOLV to define small regions with microstructured detail.