Physics Today, February 2014 - Back Scatter
Circuits that are thin, lightweight and bendable
hold promise for a wide variety of applications,
particularly artificial skin, implantable sensors,
and other biomedical devices.
Giovanni Salvatore and colleagues
in the Wearable Computing Group
at ETH Zürich, Switzerland,
have now demonstrated
an extremely versatile technique
for fabricating flexible circuits.
Starting with an ordinary wafer,
the researchers deposit a thin,
sacrificial polymer layer
that can be easily dissolved.
Next they add an insoluble thin film
that will serve as the ultimate substrate
for the final deposition step
-the electronic circuitry.
Dissolving the bottom polymer film
frees the circuit-topped insoluble film,
at which point it can be transferred
to its intended destination.
The photo that can be find
on page 68 of the printed edition
highlights one appeal of the technique:
extreme flexibility and conformability.
These film transistors lie on a 1-µm film
[1 µm: is one micrometer,
a millionth of a meter, 0.000001 m or 10ˆ(-6) m]
of the biocompatible polymer parylene
that's been draped across human hairs
about 100 µm in diameter.
Despite the film's strong curvature,
the transistor behavior is unaffected.
Furthermore, the choice of film materials
allows for significant customization.
The insoluble film could be elastic or prestrained
(see Physics Today, May 2008, page 84),
and the circuit electrodes
could be transparent or opaque.
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