Design enabled stretchable electronics: gap mitigation, mirroring, and reconfiguration

The quest of advancements in electronics has created life changing impacts on living beings. The miniaturization has been the key over decades, and now we have closely approached the physical limit of scaling a fundamental unit of electronics. New directions in terms of flexibility and stretchability has emerged in electronics towards achieving IoT and IoE applications. Stretchable devices has been fundamentally focused on the interconnect design using serpentine, and spiral design connecting the rigid islands or the rigid integrated circuits on the soft polymeric platform. This trivial design technique creates gaps and voids in the stretched structure which leads to reduction in the pixel density and resolution critically important for display applications. Here, we present a mechanism by means of multi-level architecture to mitigate the gaps and simultaneously retaining high pixel density/resolution in displays. Stress distribution of the fundamental unit cells in these fractal design and stretchable architectures has been optimized to distribute load equally, providing more stretchability compared to restricted when arranged in arrays. The concept of unit cell also enables the reconfigurability of the same array of unit cells to form different shapes, entirely based on how the nodes and the unit cell islands are moved and positioned that can reconfigure from square to elliptical, or triangular or hexagonal geometries.