Robust Fabric Substrates for Photonic Textile Applications

Textiles are a ubiquitous part of human life. By combining them with electronics to create electronic textile systems, new application fields emerge. In this paper, technology and applications of light-emitting textile systems are presented: a fabric substrate is described for electronic textile with robust interwoven connections between the conductive yarns in it. The fabric robustness, as a function of the electrical reliability of its conductive yarn connections, is shown to hold over large deformations. This fabric is then used to create a light-emitting diode (LED) based photonic textile display. Finally, we will show an example of an application that could make use of such a photonic textile system.