Stretchable and Foldable Silicon Integrated Circuits
Dae-Hyeong Kim,1*
Jong-Hyun Ahn,2*
Won Mook Choi,1*
Hoon-Sik Kim,1
Tae-Ho Kim,1
Jizhou Song,3
Yonggang Y. Huang,5
Zhuangjian Liu,6
Chun Lu,6
John A. Rogers1,3,4
We have developed a simple approach to high-performance, stretchable, and foldable integrated circuits. The systems integrate inorganic electronic materials, including aligned arrays of nanoribbons of single crystalline silicon, with ultrathin plastic and elastomeric substrates. The designs combine multilayer neutral mechanical plane layouts and "wavy" structural configurations in silicon complementary logic gates, ring oscillators, and differential amplifiers. We performed three-dimensional analytical and computational modeling of the mechanics and the electronic behaviors of these integrated circuits. Collectively, the results represent routes to devices, such as personal health monitors and other biomedical devices, that require extreme mechanical deformations during installation/use and electronic properties approaching those of conventional systems built on brittle semiconductor wafers.
1 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Beckman Institute, and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1304 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
2 School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 440-746, Korea.
3 Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1206 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
4 Departments of Chemistry, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1304 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
5 Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
6 Institute of High Performance Computing, 1 Science Park Road, #01-01 The Capricorn, Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117528.
* These authors contributed equally to this work.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jrogers{at}uiuc.edu (J.A.R.); y-huang{at}northwestern.edu (Y.Y.H.)
