Engineering High-Performance Flexible Electronics Through Scalable Manufacturing: Interplay of Materials, Processing, and Morphology

Flexible electronics have garnered extensive attention in recent years considering their promising applications across diverse fields such as communications, energy, display, healthcare, and wearable devices. Unlike laboratory-scale fabrication and integration, the transition of flexible electronics toward commercial applications demands scalable manufacturing that ensures high performance, large-area reproducibility, high yield, and throughput. However, achieving scalable manufacturing while maintaining device performance remains challenging, as fabrication scale-up often induces variations in material assembly, morphology evolution, and device integration, which may compromise functional reliability achieved at the laboratory scale. Generally, current flexible electronic devices can be divided into two categories: planar-type and fiber-type devices, representing two complementary platforms for realizing large-scale and highly integrated systems. In this review, scalable fabrication strategies tailored for each category and the latest advances are systematically summarized. In particular, the interplay among material design, scalable processing, morphology evolution, and device integration is highlighted, with emphasis on strategies that preserve device performance during manufacturing scale-up. Representative planar-type and fiber-type flexible electronic systems are further discussed to demonstrate how the synergistic optimization of material design and scalable manufacturing approaches enables high-performance devices for diverse applications. Finally, we outline remaining challenges and future directions to inform future developments in scalable flexible electronics.