Materials and noncoplanar mesh designs for integrated circuits with linear elastic responses to extreme mechanical deformations

• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0807476105
• Publication Date: 2008-11-18T02:40:39Z
• Authors: Dae-Hyeong Kim; Jizhou Song; Won Mook Choi; Hoon-Sik Kim; Rak-Hwan Kim; Zhuangjian Liu; Yonggang Y. Huang; Keh-Chih Hwang; Yong-wei Zhang; John A. Rogers
• Keywords: Flexible electronics; Transistors, Electronic; Plastic electronics; Equipment Design; 02 engineering and technology; 7. Clean energy; Elasticity; 620; Nanostructures; Semiconductor nanomaterials; Tensile Strength; Materials Testing; Stretchable electronics; Humans; Nanotechnology; Buckling mechanics; Stress, Mechanical; Electronics; 0210 nano-technology

Electronic systems that offer elastic mechanical responses to high-strain deformations are of growing interest because of their ability to enable new biomedical devices and other applications whose requirements are impossible to satisfy with conventional wafer-based technologies or even with those that offer simple bendability. This article introduces materials and mechanical design strategies for classes of electronic circuits that offer extremely high stretchability, enabling them to accommodate even demanding configurations such as corkscrew twists with tight pitch (e.g., 90° in ≈1 cm) and linear stretching to “rubber-band” levels of strain (e.g., up to ≈140%). The use of single crystalline silicon nanomaterials for the semiconductor provides performance in stretchable complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits approaching that of conventional devices with comparable feature sizes formed on silicon wafers. Comprehensive theoretical studies of the mechanics reveal the way in which the structural designs enable these extreme mechanical properties without fracturing the intrinsically brittle active materials or even inducing significant changes in their electrical properties. The results, as demonstrated through electrical measurements of arrays of transistors, CMOS inverters, ring oscillators, and differential amplifiers, suggest a valuable route to high-performance stretchable electronics.