Materials, Device, And Interface Engineering for Non-Conventional Electronics by Hard/Soft Material Integration

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Integrating materials with complementary properties have created new opportunities for producing structural and functional materials. For example, one can achieve mechanical flexibility with high-performance inorganic devices (which are traditionally thought of as brittle) by employing polymeric materials as matrices. The key to achieving this feat lays in carefully integrating micro- and/or nano-sized inorganic device components into a soft material matrix, while maintaining excellent device performance. Novel form factors, such as bendable, foldable, and rollable electronics have been realized through the marriage between hard and soft materials. The current stage of innovative research is on stretchable electronics, where neural interfaces, electronic muscles, and energy harvesters show immense potential. Developing stretchable devices with long-term operational stability is challenging because the electronics must withstand severe strain and volume change during operation. Consequently the major sources of device failure are crack and debonding at the interface between hard and soft materials. The short-term objective of the proposed DG program is to prevent these mechanical failure modes at the interface by controlling the material's morphology and chemistry at the interface. The methodologies come from the disciplines of polymer physics and nanofabrication and are inspired by biology. My research group's long-term goal is to devise conceptually new electronic systems with unprecedented form factors. Independent research on novel soft material matrices as well as micro- and nano-devices will also be performed in parallel. The long-term objective of the DG program is to study various phenomena at the interface between the operating devices and the novel soft material matrix. From a big-picture perspective, the knowledge gained from the DG program will also be applicable to wide range of engineering disciplines such as polymers, composite materials, MEMS, interface science, and bioelectronics. When system-level integration is realized, these non-conventional electronics will serve as novel tools with broad application in fields such as medical therapy, food engineering, and biomedical science.