Failure Modes in Textile Interconnect Lines

Many commercially available photonic textile products are made by integrating conductive yarns into textiles and attaching light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to them. Mechanical fatigue due to repeated bending at the LED attachment sites is the main cause of failure in such products. Here, we present a novel encapsulation method to reduce failure in photonic textiles that results in a more gradual transition from stiff to compliant regions. We present the result of accelerated aging tests including a mechanical failure model. The results show that we are able to reduce failure at the attachment site through our new encapsulation process and double the lifetime.