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Controlled buckling of semiconductor nanoribbons for stretchable electronics

Hanqing Jiang's picture

The success of electronic paper, roll-up displays, eye-like digital camera and many other potential applications of flexible and stretchable electronics will mainly depend on the availability of electronic materials to be stretched, compressed and bent. Previous efforts to develop electronic materials that can be mechanically deformed without breaking have mainly focused on small organic molecules and polymers. However, low charge mobility of these organic materials cannot compete with devices made from inorganic materials such as silicon and gallium arsenide.

The brittleness of the inorganic materials makes it very difficult to be stretched so it is impractical to incorporate them directly into flexible electronic devices. We (Yugang Sun, Won Mook Choi, Hanqing Jiang, Young Huang and John A. Rogers) overcome this problem by demonstrating that spectacular bendability, compressibility and stretchability can be accomplished for both silicon and gallium arsenide1. Our approach relies on controlling how single-crystal nanoribbons made from these materials buckle when they are attached to a flexible substrate (see attached publication in Nature Nanotechnology for details). This work opens new avenues for controlling the three-dimensional shape of inorganic nanostructures and offers immediate opportunities for fabricating flexible electronic devices with superior performance from the inorganic materials currently used in microelectronics.

The buckling has also been used to turn intrinsically rigid inorganic materials into flexible ones, and several groups have shown that buckled structures with built-in stress can be compressed, stretched or bent without being damaged (such as Lacour et al., 2003, 2005; Huang et al., 2005; Khang et al., 2006). However, the maximum strain that such structures can accommodate is limited. Buckled silicon ribbons, for example, can only sustain tensile strains of less than 15% (Khang et al., 2005). Now we have overcome this limitation by patterning the surface of a pre-strained elastic substrate with reactive groups, allowing them to control how the ribbons buckle when the strain is released. The controlled buckling pattern is attached. Our nonlinear buckling model has shown that the stretchability of nanoribbons made of single-crystal silicon and gallium arsenide can be as high as 100%, which was also validated by experiments.

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