Stretchable electronics have attracted extensive research interest in wearable electronics, e-skin and biomedical applications. Among them, organic or polymer memory has been considered as basic elements in stretchable information devices. We discovered that the memory-type behaviors of highly stretchable carbohydrate-block-polyisoprene (MH-<i>b</i>-PI) block copolymers based devices, including WORM, Flash and DRAM, by controlling the self-assembly nanostructures (vertical cylinder, horizontal cylinder and order-packed sphere). Note that the MH and PI blocks respectively provided the charge-trapping and stretchable function. In this study, the intrinsically stretchable BCPs consisting MH and polybutylacrylate (PBA) blocks in linear AB-type, ABA-type, and star-shaped architectures were successfully synthesized by ATRP and click reaction. The BCP thin films showed either parallel cylindrical MH domains or highly-ordered spherical MH domains, dependent on PBA volume fraction. The phase-separated structures and the domain sizes of the BCPs also varied with the molecular architectures. The stretchability of the thin films can be significantly improved by introducing the flexible PBA segment into BCPs. In particular, the ABA-type and star-shaped BCPs with end MH segments could endure high strain and no crack is observed even at 100 % strain. Thus, the FET memory devices with ABA-type and star-shaped BCP thin films as charge trapping layers exhibited remarkably stable charge carrier mobilities and memory windows when the films are under cyclic 50 % strain up to 1000 cycles. This work demonstrates that the design of the molecular architectures provides BCPs a great potential to be applied in high-performance stretchable and wearable electronic devices.

Molecular architecture effect of oligosaccharide-based block copolymers for stretchable electrical memory devices

256th National Meeting (2018)

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