Sputtered Zinc Electrodes on Pullulan Substrates for Flexible Biodegradable Transient Electronics

Abstract

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Biodegradable transient electronics, devices which easily breakdown to safe constituent parts at their end of life, are an important emerging research direction for tackling electronic waste, as well as enabling new applications such as wearable health monitors which can easily be washed off the body at the end of use. Pullulan is a widely used edible substrate which naturally biodegrades and has previously been used with Silver tracks for creating transient electronics. However, Silver tracks are not generally biodegradable. This paper demonstrates the creation of Zinc tracks for biodegradable transient devices, where the Zinc is approximately half of the recommended daily allowance to Zinc to be ingested. We demonstrate resistivities in the range 1-10 Ω/□ for potential use in electrode and antenna applications.