A Sewing Approach to the Fabrication of Eco/bioresorbable Electronics.

Eco/bioresorbable electronics represent an emerging class of technology defined by an ability to dissolve or otherwise harmlessly disappear in environmental or biological surroundings after a period of stable operation. The resulting devices provide unique capabilities as temporary biomedical implants, environmental sensors, and related systems. Recent publications report schemes to overcome challenges in fabrication that follow from the low thermostability and/or high chemical reactivity of the eco/bioresorbable constituent materials. Here, this work reports the use of high-speed sewing machines, as the basis for a high-throughput manufacturing technique that addresses many requirements for these applications, without the need for high temperatures or reactive solvents. Results demonstrate that a range of eco/bioresorbable metal wires and polymer threads can be embroidered into complex, user-defined conductive patterns on eco/bioresorbable substrates. Functional electronic components, such as stretchable interconnects and antennas are possible, along with fully integrated systems. Examples of the latter include wirelessly powered light-emitting diodes, radiofrequency identification tags, and temporary cardiac pacemakers. These advances add to a growing range of options in high-throughput, automated fabrication of eco/bioresorbable electronics.

High-throughput printing of combinatorial materials from aerosols.

The development of new materials and their compositional and microstructural optimization are essential in regard to next-generation technologies such as clean energy and environmental sustainability. However, materials discovery and optimization have been a frustratingly slow process. The Edisonian trial-and-error process is time consuming and resource inefficient, particularly when contrasted with vast materials design spaces1. Whereas traditional combinatorial deposition methods can generate material libraries2,3, these suffer from limited material options and inability to leverage major breakthroughs in nanomaterial synthesis. Here we report a high-throughput combinatorial printing method capable of fabricating materials with compositional gradients at microscale spatial resolution. In situ mixing and printing in the aerosol phase allows instantaneous tuning of the mixing ratio of a broad range of materials on the fly, which is an important feature unobtainable in conventional multimaterials printing using feedstocks in liquid-liquid or solid-solid phases4-6. We demonstrate a variety of high-throughput printing strategies and applications in combinatorial doping, functional grading and chemical reaction, enabling materials exploration of doped chalcogenides and compositionally graded materials with gradient properties. The ability to combine the top-down design freedom of additive manufacturing with bottom-up control over local material compositions promises the development of compositionally complex materials inaccessible via conventional manufacturing approaches.