Engineers and materials scientists at University of California in Berkeley created an interactive electronic film with a network of pressure sensors built into flexible plastic. The findings from the lab of Berkeley engineering professor Ali Javey, with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, appear online in yesterday’s advance issue of the journal Nature Materials (paid subscription required).
The material lights up when touched, and the illumination gets brighter as more pressure is applied. The researchers believe the film has potential as an electronic skin for robots that interact with humans, wallpaper that can double as a touch-screen display, in automobile dashboards, and as an interactive form of bandage that doubles as a vital-signs monitor.
Javey and colleagues began with a silicon wafer, on which they cured a thin layer of polymer plastic. Using conventional semiconductor fabrication techniques, the researchers layered on a transistor, pressure sensor, and organic light-emitting diode (LED) into a 1-pixel space, on samples sized 16-pixels square. After applying the electronic layers, the plastic flim was peeled from the silicon base, with the film with network of sensors bound to it.
“What makes this technology potentially easy to commercialize,” notes Javey, “is that the process meshes well with existing semiconductor machinery.” His lab is now working on adding the abilities to sense temperature and light, as well as pressure, to the film.
The following brief video gives a demonstration of the sensor film.
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