| Flexible electronic devices fabricated with light and low cost plastic substrates have great potential in unconventional electronic application areas, such as wearable computers, flexible displays and personal health-sensing devices. To attain that flexibility, flexible electronic materials, such as organic materials have to be used. Yet many electronic applications need materials with performance qualities greater than those of the organic materials, such as high electron mobility, durability and stability under harsh environments and conditions. The inorganic semiconductor material, such as single crystal silicon, is the most famous and well-proven material for these qualities. We made single crystal inorganic materials to be flexible by slicing them into ultra-thin nano-ribbons or nano-membranes. With flexible nano-structures, the basic building blocks for electronics on flexible plastic substrate were successfully demonstrated; these electronics include n-type, p-type and complementary MOS devices and their circuits.;However, even flexible electronic devices with the simple mechanical bendability described above, not to mention conventional wafer-based device technologies, have clear limitations in certain applications on irregular and rugged surfaces, such as those on a wearable computer or various personal health sensing systems and hemispherical detector arrays. Therefore, other qualities besides flexibility, such as foldability (extreme bendability) or stretchability, are required. In this dissertation, a simple approach to high performance, stretchable and foldable integrated circuits was developed by integrating aligned arrays of nanoribbons of single crystalline silicon with ultrathin plastic and elastomeric substrates with an unconventional geometry, such as wavy and non-coplanar pop-up structures. In addition, various high potential applications, including electronic devices on gloves or disposable papers and encapsulation strategies for practical product applications, were also developed. |
