Design Enabled Stretchable Electronics: gap mitigation, mirroring, and reconfiguration

摘要

The quest of advancements in electronics has created life changing impacts on living beings. The miniaturization hasbeen the key over decades, and now we have closely approached the physical limit of scaling a fundamental unit ofelectronics. New directions in terms of flexibility and stretchability has emerged in electronics towards achieving IoTand IoE applications. Stretchable devices has been fundamentally focused on the interconnect design using serpentine,and spiral design connecting the rigid islands or the rigid integrated circuits on the soft polymeric platform. This trivialdesign technique creates gaps and voids in the stretched structure which leads to reduction in the pixel density andresolution critically important for display applications. Here, we present a mechanism by means of multi-levelarchitecture to mitigate the gaps and simultaneously retaining high pixel density/resolution in displays. Stressdistribution of the fundamental unit cells in these fractal design and stretchable architectures has been optimized todistribute load equally, providing more stretchability compared to restricted when arranged in arrays. The concept of unitcell also enables the reconfigurability of the same array of unit cells to form different shapes, entirely based on how thenodes and the unit cell islands are moved and positioned that can reconfigure from square to elliptical, or triangular orhexagonal geometries.