Mechanical Engineering professor develops first-ever reliability standard for flexible hybrid electronics
Published: Aug 27, 2026 10:30 AM
By Phillip Tutor
Auburn's Pradeep Lall displays an FHE inside his laboratory.
In January 2023, the leading global industry association for semiconductor and electronics design sought an expert to pilot a task force charged with creating reliability standards for flexible hybrid electronics (FHE).
The association, SEMI, contacted Auburn Engineering’s Pradeep Lall, the John and Anne MacFarlane Endowed Distinguished Professor and Alumni Professor.
Now complete, this standard — SEMI FH5, Guide for Reliability of Flexible Hybrid Electronics — is the result of research and collaboration between Lall, the task force’s academic co-lead; government co-lead David Sabanosh, deputy program manager of NextFlex Manufacturing Innovation Institute, the U.S. Department of War-sponsored institute that focuses on FHE advancements; and other members of the FHE Global Technical Committee. The SEMI FH5 was a result of a three-plus-year effort in the creation of the SEMI Document 7242, which became the SEMI FH5.
As director of NextFlex’s Alabama Node of NextFlex and the Auburn University Electronics Packaging Research Institute (AUEPRI), Lall immediately understood the mission. A recipient of the SEMI R&D Achievements Flexi Award in 2023 for contributions to additively manufactured electronics, Lall drew on his over 30 years of work in electronics reliability as he considered the expectations of this new reliability standard.
“There were no reliability standards previously,” he said. “These are first-of-its-kind reliability standards for flexible hybrid electronics. That's the uniqueness.”
By merging additively printed electronics with silicon-based integrated circuits, FHE assemblies are able to address the needs for a number of functions from sensing, acquisition, communications and power delivery. The assembly fabrication starts with conductive lines printed onto flexible paper or polymer substrates. Microchips are mounted onto these flexible substrates, which, unlike conventional rigid circuit boards, are lightweight and bendable and can be used in myriad devices, such as wearable health patches and sensors, foldable or wrap-around phone screens and aerospace components. The possibilities are innumerable.
FHE components feature a host of modernized traits, including flexible form factors, lower manufacturing costs, compact designs and enhanced processing power. Scientists such as Lall view their use as foundational elements of electronics manufacturing in the 21st century.
The development of FHE assemblies is an emerging trend and the lack of global testing standards risked stunting their adoption, technology insertion and manufacturing growth. Crucial to any new manufacturing process is testing products for effectiveness and reliability before entering the commercial marketplace, Lall said.
“What people don't know is how to test the reliability of these flexible electronics,” he said. “They just don't know because the previously existing standards are for rigid electronics.”
Thus, Lall and his colleagues began research, both broad and narrow, into the previous standards and the existing gaps. The goal was to create reliability standards that would assist manufacturers as they successfully transitioned FHE components into viable commercial products.
The task force concentrated on several focus points, including the designs required for successful testing; the tools needed to assure consistency of testing; variables that should be tested; and the necessary analytical methods and modeling tools.
“In the absence of standards, manufacturers don't know how long they should test to assure a certain field life,” he said.
Passenger cars whose lifespans vary widely depending on multiple factors are examples, Lall said. Manufacturers cover certain product failures during warranty periods — say, three years or 36,000 miles — but consumers assume those costs when warranties expire. Through extensive testing and data collection, car manufacturers have a thorough understanding of failure rates for their vehicles’ assorted parts. That data fuels warranty guidelines, assessment of product refresh cycles and maintenance schedules.
For FHE manufacturers, that hasn’t been the case — until now.
“If one has a product fail prematurely in the field, one gets a bad name owing to a poor quality product,” Lall said. “On top of that, there are added costs related to repair and replacement, so it's a terrible thing all around. These standards are intended to identify methods of how to test, what kind of tests should be run, how long they should be run and how to determine what they actually say.”
The long-range effects of FHE reliability standards offer a delicious blend of economic optimism and technological advances, Lall said. Leadership roles in AUEPRI and the Alabama Node allow him to envision increased roles for Auburn in the global FHE and additive research-and-development industries as well as shared expertise among scientists and manufacturers around the world.
Lall calls it the “flexible electronics ecosystem” that exists at Auburn — an ecosystem that includes academic research, classroom instruction and providing platform opportunities for small- and medium-sized companies to conduct limited product runs and launches at AUEPRI. FHE reliability standards are a bedrock necessity.
“If you want to assure reliability for your application, that's how you would do it,” he said. “You would take the Auburn process and make a product right here in the U.S., cost-effectively.
“It is a pathway to take technology maturation and technology transition out of the labs and into the commercial space. That's what the FHE standard is intended to enable, to take proof of concept and change it into commercial capability.”
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