Biodegradable stretchable devices pose remarkable opportunities for health and environmental monitoring, consumer products and national defense. Mechanical compliance, lightweight, and transience are important attributes for applications on dynamic surfaces or in cases where manual recovery would be prohibitively difficult and expensive. For example, conformable implantable devices that are biodegradable would avoid removal surgeries, reducing the likelihood of infection and patient distress. Moreover, the environmentally critical problem of discarded electronic waste would be relieved. Their practical application critically hinges on the development of integrated transistors that <i>simultaneously </i>exhibit the aforementioned attributes while maintaining high electronic performance. While numerous biodegradable, stretchable insulators have been demonstrated as suitable device substrates and dielectrics, imparting biodegradability and stretchability to electronically conducting and semiconducting materials presents a particular challenge due to the inherent resistance of most conductive chemistries to hydrolytic cleavage and their typical crystalline nature, respectively. To address this challenge, I developed a dual approach relying on recent chemical and mechanical strategies: (1) the use of imine bonds as conjugated and acid-labile backbone linkages and (2) the nanoconfinement of semiconducting polymers within a surface-engineered, biodegradable elastomer to enable stretchability. The mechanical, electrical, and accelerated degradation characteristics of thin film blends and devices will be presented. This systems represents the first transient and stretchable semiconducting material with mobilities on par with reported polymeric systems.

Biodegradable and stretchable electronic materials for transient electronics

256th National Meeting (2018)

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