Fundamental Building Blocks for Circuits on Textiles

Abstract

This paper presents the necessary ingredients for a successful realization of electrical circuits on fabrics. We start with the specification of a hybrid fabric as substrate. The discussion of textile transmission lines as well as textile interconnects reveals a flat frequency response up to about 2 GHz and 600 MHz, respectively. The proposed transmission lines feature line impedances in the range of 250 Omega. A novel interposer concept is the key technology to our approach of implementing circuits on textiles. We introduce different variants of this interposer and give formulas to determine their fabric area consumption. The presented technologies allow realization and wiring of circuits on fabrics with signal frequencies up to several hundred megahertz.