Stretchable Electronic Devices with Improved Mechanical Properties and Lifetimes

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Electronic devices of the future will be stretchable, twistable, and deformable. This stretchability will enable applications impossible to achieve with current rigid materials, such as flexible lighting and displays. It will even open the way to completely new applications, such as "electronic skin" and conformable health-monitoring devices and implants that display biomedical images and information. Although current research has produced some exciting demonstrations of stretchable electronic devices, researchers have exclusively built these devices on a stretchable material that does not provide protection from moisture and oxygen, which degrade devices such as organic light-emitting diodes and organic thin-film transistors. The present research project will solve this problem in a simple and straightforward way: It will implement the use of a stretchable material - butyl rubber - that is notable for its impermeability to moisture and oxygen. The benefit of using butyl rubber will be demonstrated by fabricating stretchable organic light-emitting devices that achieve long-term operation under ambient conditions.