Nanofabrication for all-soft and high-density electronic devices based on liquid metal

Min-gu Kim, Devin K. Brown and Oliver Brand ()
Additional contact information
Min-gu Kim: Georgia Institute of Technology
Devin K. Brown: Georgia Institute of Technology
Oliver Brand: Georgia Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Innovations in soft material synthesis and fabrication technologies have led to the development of integrated soft electronic devices. Such soft devices offer opportunities to interact with biological cells, mimicking their soft environment. However, existing fabrication technologies cannot create the submicron-scale, soft transducers needed for healthcare and medical applications involving single cells. This work presents a nanofabrication strategy to create submicron-scale, all-soft electronic devices based on eutectic gallium-indium alloy (EGaIn) using a hybrid method utilizing electron-beam lithography and soft lithography. The hybrid lithography process is applied to a biphasic structure, comprising a metallic adhesion layer coated with EGaIn, to create soft nano/microstructures embedded in elastomeric materials. Submicron-scale EGaIn thin-film patterning with feature sizes as small as 180 nm and 1 μm line spacing was achieved, resulting in the highest resolution EGaIn patterning technique to date. The resulting soft and stretchable EGaIn patterns offer a currently unrivaled combination of resolution, electrical conductivity, and electronic/wiring density.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14814-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-14814-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14814-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().