Screen printing of stretchable electrodes for large area LED matrix
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As electronic devices are indispensable in many aspects of our lives today, their integration with unconventional surfaces is increasingly essential. Electronic devices which maintain their electrical properties upon stretching are desirable for various wearable applications. Stretchable devices demonstrated are conventionally fabricated using semiconductor processing techniques. In this study, we demonstrate stretchable electrodes, which are basic components of electrical circuits, using screen printing, a large area printing method. It provides a low cost and scalable method to fabricate large area stretchable devices. Despite the larger width and thickness of the electrodes which increases the stiffness of the material, stretchability beyond 40% is demonstrated, which is suitable for certain wearable applications. The stretchable electrodes are integrated with light emitting diodes (LEDs) to demonstrate a stretchable LED matrix. The large area LED matrices exhibit variable stretchability, depending on the LED areal coverage. This technique is expected to be applicable in the fabrication of other stretchable, large area, and more complex electronic systems.
Potential applications for flexible and stretchable electronic devices are very vast, ranging from electronic skin to health and wellness monitors. Conventional electronic devices based on stiff substrates are unable to fulfill these needs.1–3 A basic building block of such devices is the flexible and stretchable electrode. Various strategies to lend stretchability to electrodes have been used, which include the use of networks of low-dimensional materials and the design of mechanically flexible and stretchable structures. Several groups have reported using networks of materials, such as carbon nanotubes,4–6 graphene,7,8 silver nanowires,9–11 conductive polymers12,13 or a mixture of them14 to form stretchable electrodes. Thin films of these materials maintain good electrical conductivity even upon mechanical deformation. On the other hand, other groups continue to use metal electrodes with high intrinsic electrical conductivity. By clever design of the metal electrodes, the maximum strain experienced by metal electrodes during flexing and stretching is minimized.15–24 These structures are fabricated using conventional semiconductor processing techniques, such as photolithography, sputtering, evaporation and etching and often utilize the transfer printing method. In this work, we explore the use of an alternative manufacturing method, screen printing, to fabricate Contributing Editor: Gary L. Messing Address all correspondence to these authors. a) e-mail: [email protected] b) e-mail: [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/jmr.2015.213 J. Mater. Res., Vol. 30, No. 15, Aug 14, 2015
stretchable metal electrodes. Screen printing, a low cost and large area printing method, is attractive for scalable commercial applications. However, the size of features printed using screen printing is larger than the size of features achievable via conventional semiconductor
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