SKKU Develops Stretchable Electronic Circuits You Can Assemble Your Way

A joint research team led by Professors Donghee Son and Jin-Hong Park at Sungkyunkwan University has developed a stretchable, self-healing, and reconfigurable electronic circuit platform that can autonomously recover from damage and be disassembled and reassembled on demand. This work introduces a new paradigm for electronic devices that simultaneously addresses long-term stability and personalized reconfigurability, which are critical for electronic skin (e-skin) and next-generation wearable and implantable electronics.

Electronic skin is a core technology for sensing and processing diverse physiological signals through direct skin contact or implantation inside the body. For long-term, comfortable use, e-skin must be thin, soft, and mechanically compliant, closely matching the properties of biological tissues. However, these requirements also make such devices highly vulnerable to mechanical deformation, including stretching, bending, and tearing, which can lead to device failure and loss of function during repeated use or prolonged wear. In medical and healthcare applications, where physiological conditions and functional demands continuously change, reconfigurability—the ability to flexibly modify electrical functions and circuit architectures—is as important as mechanical robustness.

To address these challenges, the research team developed stretchable transistors in which all key components—electrodes, semiconductors, and dielectric layers—are based on self-healing polymers. The electrodes and semiconductor layers were formed by incorporating carbon nanotubes and organic semiconductors into self-healing polymer matrices, achieving both high electrical performance and efficient self-recovery. The dielectric layer was also realized as a thin film of a self-healing polymer. These transistors can be assembled via a transfer process without conventional soldering or permanent bonding steps and maintain stable electrical characteristics after more than 100 cycles of 30% tensile strain. Even after severe physical damage, the devices effectively restored their electrical performance through autonomous self-healing.

Beyond unit-level devices, the team integrated the self-healing transistors into a 5 × 5 array, demonstrating uniform drain current characteristics and stable operation even under water. Furthermore, biocompatibility assessments and animal studies confirmed that the devices retained their electrical performance after one week of implantation in vivo, highlighting their potential for implantable bioelectronic applications. A key innovation of this work is the concept of modular electronic circuits that can be assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured. By combining self-healing transistors with carbon nanotube-based resistors, the researchers constructed logic circuits that operated reliably under mechanical deformation. Leveraging the self-healing properties, they experimentally demonstrated that an assembled NOR gate could be disassembled and reconfigured into a NAND gate, proving that a single hardware platform can flexibly switch functions without replacing components.

In addition, the team integrated carbon nanotube-based resistive tactile sensor modules and light-emitting capacitive display modules with the self-healing transistor array to create a wearable electronic skin system that provides visual feedback in response to touch. When attached to the skin, mechanical stimuli were detected by the tactile sensors, and the corresponding light-emitting pixels were activated through the self-healing transistor array, enabling intuitive and interactive user interfaces.

The researchers stated that "the recovered electrical performance after self-healing is nearly indistinguishable from the pristine state." They emphasized that this technology, which can autonomously heal and be reconfigured according to user needs, is expected to serve as a core platform for next-generation wearable medical devices, robotic skin, and intelligent prosthetic systems.

This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea. The results were published online on May 19, 2025, in Nature Electronics.

More information:
Jaepyo Jang et al, Reconfigurable assembly of self-healing stretchable transistors and circuits for integrated systems, Nature Electronics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-025-01389-z

Provided by Sungkyunkwan University