Omnidirectional Stretchable Inorganic‐Material‐Based Electronics with Enhanced Performance

Abstract

Inorganic material‐based devices are well known for their high performance, excellent stability, and hence suitability for fast computation and communication. But their nonflexibility and nonstretchability often hinder their application in several emerging areas where conformability with irregular 3D surfaces is required in addition to the high performance. Herein, with honeycomb like patterns, the omnidirectional stretchability and conformability of inorganic material‐based device are demonstrated without sacrificing the performance. The simple method presented here facilitates the transfer of patterned inorganic material‐based devices from rigid poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA)/glass substrate onto flexible/stretchable substrate such as polydimethylsiloxane simply by placing a water droplet at the PMMA/glass interface. As a proof of concept, the intrinsically brittle indium–gallium–zinc oxide (IGZO)‐based stretchable photodetector devices are fabricated. These devices can be stretched up to 10% without performance degradation, which is a significant improvement considering the less than ≈1% fracture limit of IGZO. With Au decoration, these devices show 127‐fold higher responsivity (295.3 mA W−1) than planar IGZO devices. The higher fracture strain together with the omnidirectional stretchability underpinned by the honeycomb pattern could allow presented devices to conform to complex hemispherical surfaces such as the human eyes, thus showing significant potential for future high‐performance stretchable electronics.

Stretchable Systems

“…In this aspect, semiconductor materials whose electronics properties lie between that of conductors and insulators have been widely used. Such materials have been explored in the development of the FETs, LEDs and solar cells [236,237]. In pursuit of the development of devices, various active materials have been investigated and this section provides an overview of such materials.…”

Multifunctional Electronic Skin With a Stack of Temperature and Pressure Sensor Arrays

“…This could enhance the granularity of the haptic information obtainable from e-Skin and could enable robots with human-like dexterity, cognitive skills, and abilities [4,[6][7][8]. The advantage of such e-Skin also expands to the provision of high-dimensional information from the environment for application in wearable health-monitoring system, smart phones, displays, and prosthetics [3,4,9,10].…”

High-performance printed electronics based on inorganic semiconducting nano to chip scale structures

“…microwires (MWs)) and chip (e.g. ultra-thin chips (UTCs)) scale structures [25,26,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. These nano/micro/chip scale structures are typically single-crystalline and result in high-performance electronics.…”

“…The transfer printing (TP) and contact printing (CP) methods developed to transfer or print these structures onto flexible substrates could address the traditional thermal budget issue associated with the inorganic semiconducting materials i.e. due to high-temperature processing requirements it is difficult to fabricate devices directly over flexible polymeric substrates [26,29,47,49,56]. Figure 2 shows a qualitative comparison of these technologies in terms of fabricationcost and device-performance along with their advantages and limitations.…”