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Stretchable LEDs

Light-emitting electronic skin

Nature Photonics volume 7, pages 769–771 (2013)Cite this article

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Flexible electronics and optoelectronics have potential applications in energy generation, biomedicine, robotics and displays. Two recent demonstrations of highly stretchable polymer LEDs suggest that commercial devices may soon become viable.

The development of flexible and stretchable electronics and optoelectronics has been attracting increasing interest in recent years. Electronic devices fabricated on human-skin-like substrates are often referred to as electronic skins. They can offer functions such as chemical and biological sensing, and be fabricated to be biocompatible, biodegradable and self-powered1,2,3. The development of stretchable light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that suit integration with electronic skins is exciting because such LEDs can potentially be used to realize visual readout of sensing data or generate a display directly on artificial skin itself.

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Figure 1: a, Photographs of a stretchable electroluminescent PLED with AgNW–PUA electrodes under operation from 0% to 120% strain6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jeffrey B.-H. Tok and Zhenan Bao are at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Michael Vosgueritchian, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA,

    Michael Vosgueritchian, Jeffrey B.-H. Tok & Zhenan Bao

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  1. Michael Vosgueritchian
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  2. Jeffrey B.-H. Tok
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  3. Zhenan Bao
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Correspondence to Zhenan Bao.

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Vosgueritchian, M., Tok, JH. & Bao, Z. Light-emitting electronic skin. Nature Photon 7, 769–771 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.251

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