Introduction

Today, the interaction of human individuals with electronicdevices demands specific user skills. In future, improved user interfaces canlargely alleviate this problem and push the exploitation of microelectronicsconsiderably. In this context, the concept of smart clothes promises greateruser-friendliness, user empowerment, and more efficient services support. Wearableelectronics responds to the acting individual in a more or less invisible way.It serves individual needs and thus makes life much easier. We believe thattoday, the cost level of important microelectronic functions is sufficientlylow and enabling key technologies are mature enough to exploit this vision tothe benefit of society. In the following, we present various technologycomponents to enable the integration of electronics into textiles.

Wearable electronics go far beyond just very smallelectronic devices to wearable flexible computers. Not only will these devicesbe embedded in textile substrates, but an electronics device or system couldultimately become the fabric itself. Electronic textiles (e-textiles) willallow the design and production of a new generation of garments withdistributed sensors and electronic functions. Such e-textiles will have therevolutionary ability to sense, act, store, emit, and move-think biomedicalmonitoring functions or new man-machine interfaces - while ideally leveragingan existing low-cost textile manufacturing infrastructure.

In the following, various technology components to enablethe integration of electronics into textiles are discussed. Key elements arePhotonic textiles using LED fabrics, a silicon-based micro-machinedthermoelectric generator chip for energy harvesting from body heat, presentedin Section 2, an interwoven antenna concept for RFID labels for theidentification of textiles described in Section 3, application ofnanotechnology in the development of CNT yarns and bio-sensing textiles.

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The author is associated with M/s. Arasan Creation, Erode.