Flexible electronics and micro/nanomanufacturing

摘要

Flexible electronics is an emerging technology, which breaks through the constraints of traditional rigid electronics, enabling electronic devices to adapt to various complex application scenarios.Meanwhile, a variety of functions including sensing, actuation and energy harvesting, promote flexible electronics to be widely used in healthcare, robotics, Internet of Things, and so on.Micro/nanomanufacturing is the key technology to realize flexible electronics.Through micro/nanomanufacturing, various micro/nano-scale electronic components such as transistors and sensors can be precisely fabricated on flexible substrates, endowing flexible electronics with excellent performance.On the other hand, the development of flexible electronics also provides new challenges for micro/nanomanufacturing, due to the new flexible materials and device morphology.Currently, flexible electronics and micro/nanomanufacturing have attracted great attention from researchers around the world.Scientists explore new materials and techniques to further expand the applications of flexible electronics.On this basis, we have organized a special topic on "Flexible Electronics and Micro/Nanomanufacturing" in National Science Open (NSO) to discuss the development of flexible electronics.The topic focuses on key issues in the design and manufacturing of flexible electronics.We have invited nine scientists from different fields to present their latest research findings and prospective analyses of flexible electronics systematically.Nano-imprint is a promising micro/nanomanufacturing technology for flexible electronics, which has the advantages of high spatial resolution, low cost, and large-area processing.Xin et al. combine a simple magnetic-field-orientation and nano-imprinting process to fabricate a micropillar arrayed sensor [1].The output of the sensor demonstrates an improvement of 115.5% due to the strain confinement effect, enabling a high sensitivity and rapid response capability to human motion.Electrohydrodynamic printing also enables the efficient manufacturing of flexible electronics.Wang et al. fabricate embedded Ag/Cu metal-mesh flexible transparent electrodes (FTE) with a sheet resistance of 0.08 /sq and 83.4% optical transmittance through self-confined electrohydrodynamic printing and selective