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Metallization Techniques for Wearable Textile

Electronics
2020 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and North American Radio Science Meeting | 978-1-7281-6670-4/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/IEEECONF35879.2020.9330165

Jorge A. Caripidis Troccola, Alexander D. Johnson, Satheesh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, John L. Volakis
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Florida International University
Miami, FL 33174, USA
jcari011@fiu.edu, ajohn326@fiu.edu, sbojjave@fiu.edu, jvolakis@fiu.edu

Abstract—Wearable electronics must be both flexible and

robust so that they can be form fitting and reliable. The first
of these were fabricated with printed conductors on rubber,
plastic, and other polymer substrates. More recently, conductive
textiles have been preferred due to their 1) inherently flexible and
lightweight physical properties, and 2) low-loss, low-dielectric
electrical properties. However, a variety of challenges persist
when implementing wearable textile electronics, with necessary
trade-offs between conductivity, durability, and flexibility. Con-
sequently, there is still a need to develop optimal metallization
approaches. In this paper, six different textile-compatible metal-
lization techniques are presented. These include adhering copper
tape, silver paint, silver thread, silver-painted silver threads
(SPST), copper mesh, and silver-painted copper mesh (SPCM) to
a denim stack-up. Microstrip transmission line (TL) prototypes
were fabricated with each method, and analyzed to determine
which textile-compatible metallization technique had the best
performance in comparison to a TL on standard printed circuit
board (PCB). Measurements show that the denim TL with SPST
conductors had the smallest losses versus the PCB standard, with
only an average loss of 0.03 dB/cm from 0.5 to 3 GHz.
Index Terms—metallization, textile, wearable, textile-
compatible, wearable devices, wearable electronics, textile
electronics.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Textile-based electronics have been of great interest in
recent years due to improved embroidery resolution [1]. This
has particularly been reflected in available wearable electronic
devices (wearables) such as smart vests, tracking systems,
sensors, etc. When designing these devices, weight, durability,
and flexibility are important parameters, as these devices
should not be restrictive to any movements (e.g. stretching,
bending, twisting). For these reasons, textile materials are one
of the best solutions for wearable electronics. Nevertheless,
there are still some persisting challenges with the technology.
The majority of previous papers on textile electronics focus
on textile material characterization and simple antenna ele-
ments, such as microstrip patch antennas [2]. However, there
are various issues that should be evaluated when fabricating
textile electronics. It is important to note that most textile-
compatible metallization techniques available have a trade-
space of drawbacks. In fact, even automated embroidery pro-
cesses are prone to inaccuracies and are not easily repeatable
due to the stretching properties of fabric substrates. Also, a
This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research
(AFSOR) grant FA9550-18-1-0191.
Fig. 1: Microstrip transmission line prototypes with (a) PCB, (b) copper tape,
(c) silver paint, (d) silver thread, (e) silver-painted silver threads (SPST), (f)
copper mesh, and (g) silver-painted copper mesh (SPCM) metallizations.
designer must choose their thread count by weighing high fre-
quency conductivity against significant fabrication time. Other
metallization techniques, such as copper tape, are significantly
less time exhaustive and inherently highly conductive, but lack
durability and deteriorate under vigorous movements.
For these reasons, we conducted a study to assess the
performance of six different textile-compatible metallization
techniques on denim substrates, found in Fig. 1. Notably,
we studied 1) copper tape, 2) silver paint, 3) silver thread,
4) silver-painted silver threads (SPST), 5) copper mesh, and
6) silver-painted copper mesh (SPCM) metallizations. The
employed electrically conductive silver thread (E-thread) was
Elektrisola-7, consisting of 7 Cu/Ag50 amalgam filaments
in each 0.04 mm diameter thread [3]. Also, the silver paint
utilized was the 842AR Super Shield, a solvent-based acrylic
lacquer pigmented with extremely conductive silver flakes [4].
Finally, the copper mesh used was a 200 wire/inch lattice of
2 mil copper wires with 3 mil lattice openings [5].
II. FABRICATION AND D IMENSIONS
To test the performance of the studied metallization tech-
niques, the seven different microstrip transmission lines (TLs)
in Fig. 1 were fabricated. Each TL had a line-width of 6 mm
on a 3cm×10cm substrate. First, a printed circuit board (PCB)
TL was etched as a reference. This consisted of factory rolled-
copper on a 1.5 mm thick Rogers RT/duroid 5880 substrate
(r = 2.2). The other TLs were fabricated on a custom denim
substrate stack-up design of approximately 1 mm thickness.
This stack-up consisted of two back-to-back denim sheets
metallized on their outer faces and taped together on their

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TABLE I: Prototype Dimensions. Note: Substrate thickness ranges from 1 mm to 1.71 mm depending on air gap and compression.

TL Width (mm) TL Length (mm) TL Thickness (mm) Substrate Thickness (mm)

PCB 5.84 99.94 0.03 1.55
Copper Tape 6.16 100.73 0.02 1.71
Silver Paint 6.68 100.44 0.07 1.63
Silver Thread 6.75 99.83 0.89 1.35
Silver-Painted Silver Threads (SPST) 6.99 99.96 1.20 1.17
Copper Mesh 6.14 98.48 0.05 1.41
Silver-Painted Copper Mesh (SPCM) 6.44 99.87 0.35 1.29
Bare Denim Stack-up — — — 1.22

Fig. 2: Measured textile TL insertion loss, referenced as a loss versus the
PCB standard.
inner faces. Standard denim (εr = 1.6) was chosen as the
textile substrate as it is commonly available and low cost [2].
Notably, due to inaccuracies in the fabrication processes, the
seven prototypes were not fabricated uniformly. For example,
there was a variable air gap between the taped denim layers
of each of the metallization techniques. That is, some of the
metallization methods created larger air gaps due to the nature
of the method. These gaps were measured by using a digital
caliper at the pre- and post-metallization stages of each denim
layer, as well as with the final stackups. Table I summarizes
the final dimensions and thicknesses of the seven TLs.
III. M EASURED T RANSMISSION L INE L OSSES
Figs. 2 and 3 illustrate the performance of the seven TL
prototypes from 0.5 GHz to 3 GHz. Fig. 2 presents the |S21 |
of each textile-compatible metallization technique, referenced
to the |S21 | of the PCB TL. These equivalent losses were
calculated by subtracting the |S21 | of the different metalliza-
tion techniques from the |S21 | of PCB fabrication across the
frequency range. Fig. 3 shows the loss of the textile-based TLs
and that of the metal PCB according to:
Loss = 1 − |S11 |2 − |S21 |2 (1)
where |S11 | and |S21 | refer to the scattering parameters of the
TL. Notably, all TLs were well matched with S11 <-10 dB.
Both data sets were normalized to a unit length (/cm) for clar-
ity. Fig. 2 shows that the SPST TL has the closest performance
to PCB while retaining the full flexibility of the textile, with
an average loss of 0.03 dB/cm across the frequency range.
Similarly, Fig. 3 suggests that the silver thread TL itself has
Fig. 3: Measured TL losses according to (1).
low losses. Moreover, we find that the copper mesh TL has
the greatest losses, even when supplemented with the silver
paint. These values are consistent with previously recorded
transmission losses in silver threaded TLs [6].
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, six different textile-compatible metallization
techniques were examined for frequencies ranging from 0.5
GHz to 3 GHz. Namely, copper tape, silver paint, silver thread,
silver-painted silver threads (SPST), copper mesh, and silver-
painted copper mesh (SPCM) TLs were evaluated against a
PCB TL. It was found that the SPST TL had the smallest losses
out of all the textile TLs while the copper mesh TL had the
greatest losses, even when supplemented with the silver paint.
Further results on durability studies and reducing fabrication
variation will be presented at the conference.
R EFERENCES
[1] A. Kiourti, C. Lee, and J. L. Volakis, “Fabrication of Textile Antennas
and Circuits With 0.1 mm Precision,” IEEE Antennas and Wireless
Propagation Letters, vol. 15, pp. 151–153, 2016.
[2] M. Ahmed, M. Ahmed, and A. Shaalan, “Investigation and Comparison
of 2.4 GHz Wearable Antennas on Three Textile Substrates and Its Per-
formance Characteristics,” Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation,
vol. 05, pp. 110–120, 01 2017.
[3] [Online]. Available: https://www.elektrisola.com/conductor-
materials/plated-wires/silver-plated-copper.html
[4] [Online]. Available: https://www.mgchemicals.com/products/emi-and-rfi-
shielding/acrylic-conductive-coatings-ar-series/842ar-super-shield-silver-
conductive-coating
[5] [Online]. Available: https://www.twpinc.com/200-mesh-copper-002-wire-
dia
[6] D. Vital, J. Zhong, S. Bhardwaj, and J. Volakis, “Loss-Characterization
and guidelines for Embroidery of Conductive Textiles,” 2018 IEEE Int.
Symp. on Antennas and Propagation (APSURSI), 7 2019.

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