Abstract
Recently, flexible electronics technology becomes more and more attractive in industry, due to the advantages of light weight, easy fabrication, large area, flexible, sustain shock and low cost. The applications of flexible electronic have been widely found, especially in flexible display and tactile sensor. Therefore, we designed and fabricated a novel tactile sensor for a joystick and hope it can be applied on flexible display to control 3D virtual image. In this thesis, a novel flexible and transparent tactile sensor which consists four capacitors in one sensing cell, is proposed with the desired properties: flexible, transparent, able to be touched by any objects and support multi-touch. The concept of the developed sensor is able to detect normal, shear, and pulling forces. The pulling force can be detected since friction-Assisted pulling force is implemented in the proposed sensor. The long-term goal of this study is using the normal, shear, and pulling force to control the 3D image and is applied to a flexible display. The model of the sensor is first established, then the commercial software is utilized to simulate the behavior and to test the performance of the device. Fabrication such as photolithography, deeply etching, sputter, demold, alignment and bonding are processed to produce the sensor. The readout circuit is designed and realized, and the experiment is setup to verify the design concept of the proposed sensor. Furthermore, the bending characteristic of flexible tactile sensor is also analyzed. The relationship between bending radii and initial capacitance is studied and the performance of tactile sensor under different bending curvature is also investigated.