Fabrication and characterization of screen printed stretchable carbon interconnects

Electronic devices that are deformable in arbitrary directions would open up a new generation of applications such as epidermal electronics, implantable electronics and soft robotics. It would not be feasible to fabricate them with conventional rigid materials. To make the electronics stretchable, one can miniaturize the functional units and link them by stretchable interconnects. In this paper, we report a method for fabrication and characterization of stretchable interconnects using deformable materials based on carbon ink and thermoplastic polyurethane. The static resistances of interconnects were on average 296 Ω/□, and half of the samples withstood single strain up to 108 % elongation. Fabricated samples survived a 1000 cycles strain test up to 40 % of stretching.