Chemists develop innovative method for making bendable electronics

A chemist and her team of researchers have made a major stride forward in the race to make cell phones, televisions and other electronics that can bend and stretch.

Tricia Carmichael, an associate professor in chemistry and biochemistry, and her PhD student Michael Miller, are two of five co-authors on a recently published paper describing a process that uses tiny silver nanowires as conductors and then arranging and mixing them right in to the adhesive that bonds them to surfaces like the plastic which could be used in bendable electronic devices.

“Glues are really durable material, so it made sense to do it that way,” Dr. Carmichael said of the never-before-used process described in the academic journal Applied Materials and Interfaces. “We wanted it to be general enough that it could be used by everyone in the industry. It’s just really practical.”

Until now, manufacturers have relied on indium tin oxide as a conductor in electronic light-emitting displays, but it’s completely unsuitable for flexible devices because it’s a brittle ceramic which cracks under relatively low bending strains and causes electrical failure.

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Student chemist perfecting data transfer for electronic devices

[Excerpt from the University of Windsor Daily News]

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Silicon-based integrated circuits currently used in cell phones and mp3 players are about as small as they’re going to get with current technology. Now, in response to consumer demand for even faster, more efficient electronic devices, chemists are racing to develop tiny molecular structures that would process data instead—and a UWindsor PhD student in chemistry has joined the race.

"Everyone knows that if we want data to be transferred faster we need to make things smaller, but we’ve almost reached the limit now with how small we can go," said Mike Miller, who recently won a three-year post-graduate doctoral scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council worth $63,000.

Miller, who works under the supervision of associate professor Tricia Carmichael, said many scientists are trying to create molecular wires and resistors by linking together chains of functional molecules that could be lined up in such a way so that one day, data could be transferred through them and they could replace conventional circuits. Miller’s attention, meanwhile, is devoted to studying ways to smooth the surfaces those molecules would bond with, as a way of ensuring better conductivity and data transfer.

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