Skin Electronics Enabled by Scalable Fabrication of Intrinsically Stretchable Transistor Array
Journal
Nature
Date
2018.03.01
Abstract
Skin-like electronics seamlessly attached on the human skin or within the body are highly desirable for applications such as health monitoring medication therapy implantable medical devices, and biological studies. In addition, they also enable technologies for human-machine interfaces, soft robotics and augmented reality. Hence, rendering skin electronics as soft and stretchable as our human skin could eliminate wearing discomfort, and more importantly, also greatly enhance the fidelity of the acquired signals from skin. Although structural engineering for rigid inorganic and organic devices has enabled circuit-level stretchability through sophisticated fabrication and some sacrifice in device density,2,10-12 moving towards intrinsically stretchable polymer materials for higher mechanical deformability and robustness, improved skin compatibility, and higher device density is attractive, but still at its infancy stage. Despite several recently reported new materials, functional intrinsically stretchable electronics are yet to be demonstrated, and held back by the lack of a scalable fabrication technology. Here we describe a fabrication process that enables high yield and uniformity, and is applicable to a variety of intrinsically stretchable polymer electronic materials. Through this, an intrinsically stretchable polymer transistor array is obtained for the first time, with unprecedented device density. The constituent transistors have an average mobility comparable to that of amorphous silicon and show only small variations under 100％ strain for 1000 cycles. Taken together, the developed transistor arrays enabled the first demonstration of intrinsically stretchable skin electronics, including an active matrix for sensing arrays as well as analog and digital circuit elements. Our fabrication process provides a general platform
for future incorporation of other (higher performance) materials and a path toward the realization and application of intrinsically stretchable skin electronics.