Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of Rubbery Stretchable Transistors

Stretchable Electronics surpass existing rigid electronics and benefit humans, machines, robots etc. where most of the activities are associated with mechanical deformation and strain. Most of the stretchable electronics are realized by using strategical architectures to realize mechanical stretching of the devices rather than imposing strain directly into the materials. However there have been recent development of stretchable electronics by fabricating them from intrinsically stretchable elastomeric electronic materials i.e., rubbery electronics from scratch. Here, this novel approach of using intrinsically stretchable, rubbery electronic materials to fabricate electronic devices which are stretchable like rubber has been used. Stretchable complimentary organic transistor based inverters were fabricated using rubbery organic semiconducting materials and were tested with and without mechanical stretching and their electrical performances were obtained. It was found that the inverters can function normally even under mechanical stretching. In addition, stretchable rubbery synaptic transistors were investigated which were also fully based on rubbery electronic materials and exhibit synaptic characteristics. These characteristics were retained even when the synaptic transistor had been stretched by 30%