Soft Materials for Flexible, Stretchable Hybrid Electronics

Printed electronics based on mechanically agile thin-film transistors (TFTs) and circuitry is a revolutionary new technology of great DoD relevance for fabricating unconventional optoelectronics using high-throughput, inexpensive solution processing/printing on flexible/stretchable substrates. The enabling materials objectives are to understand/implement the science underlying the design of: 1) flexible/stretchable printable semiconductors, dielectrics, and contacts; 2) mechanically flexible, stretchable, lightweight circuits for displays, sensors, medical diagnostics, and energy harvesting/storage, integrated with inexpensive plastics and textiles; 3) bio-electronics with soft/biocompatible/bio-degradable circuitry for tissues and organs. Combining these new materials will yield key circuit elements such as resistors, transistors, capacitors, and combinations thereof, where new functionalities will require mechanical agility, bio-compatibility, and electronics on unconventional substrates, and new processing methodologies for device fabrication. This project, supported by AFOSR, focused on the design and realization of new solution-processable, printable, electronic and passive materials, and to integrate them into flexible and stretchable electronics. The objectives were pursued through the three interconnected tasks. Task 1. Active/Passive Materials. Here we designed, synthesized, characterized, and implemented semiconductors, dielectrics, and conductors which are solution-processable at low temperatures using solvents compatible with soft substrates.