Skin-inspired organic electronic materials and devices
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Introduction Future electronics, without a doubt, are going to take a different form: We are going to put them on curved surfaces; we are going to bend and fold them. Enabling such future electronics will require new materials that not only have exceptional electronic properties, but also possess high mechanical tolerance. For example, if we are going to wear electronics, then the strain tolerance will need to be in the range of 50–80%, depending on the location where we wear them. Bendable displays require a strain tolerance greater than 50% if the radius of curvature is less than 1 mm. So where do we get inspiration to design future generations of electronic materials? In our case, we use human skin as an inspiration. Human skin is a material that combines properties such as flexibility, stretchability, biodegradability, and self-healing properties with sensing functionalities. If we are able to mimic all of these functionalities of human skin and incorporate them into our future electronic materials, this will potentially open up many new exciting possibilities. A number of prospective applications will be made possible with skin-inspired devices, for example, in robotics, medical devices, automobiles, and consumer electronics. There are different approaches to realize skin-inspired electronics. One approach, pioneered by the Rogers group, is to take rigid inorganic materials and make them ultrathin, and through structural design, make them stretchable and bendable so they are able to be placed onto curved surfaces.1–4 In my group,
we take a different approach. We begin by redesigning electronic materials, and we aim to build a path to incorporate different functionalities stepwise into these new generations of electronic materials. Therefore, we work with organic materials, polymers, and carbon nanomaterials because through molecular engineering, we can potentially modify their properties—not only the electronic properties, but also mechanical properties. Furthermore, these materials can be processed over a large area, potentially even using a roll-to-roll coating method, such that the related electronic devices can take advantage of additive and scalable manufacturing. Our vision is to understand the materials design required for the basic components, such as solar cells, sensors, integrated circuits, and batteries; all of these will mimic the properties of human skin. In the near future, we would like to use these devices to enable applications in health monitoring, environmental monitoring, and, in the intermediate term, for displays, robotic applications, and automobiles. Over a longer term, we hope to use such electronics to interface with the human body to enable implantable medical devices. Current electronics are already flexible, to an extent. However, in the future, we would like to add new functions: stretchability, biodegradability, and self-healing properties. The important questions we try to address are threefold. The first is from the fundamental side: How do we make organic and carbon electronic
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