Conductor structures for biodegradable electronics

As a first step towards biodegradable electronics components, biodegradable conductor structures were developed on biodegradable substrates produced in vacuum technology. For the combination of evaporated magnesium as a biodegradable metal and biodegradable PLA substrates, a special pre-Treatment of the substrates is essential to overcome the extremely poor sticking of magnesium on PLA. It was shown that a combination of vacuum drying and high-energy plasma treatment allows the production of conducting traces with structure sizes in the 120-pm range. Besides further optimizing the processes for conductor structures, Fraunhofer FEP is now working on extending the concept to biodegradable thin film transistors.