Self-Healing Metal Interconnect for Flexible Electronic Device

We developed a self-healing metal interconnect and applied it to a flexible electronic device. The self-healing metal interconnect regains its conductivity again even if the interconnect is broken by stretching deformation. For the selfhealing, dielectrophoresis of metal nanoparticles is used. In this paper, design, fabrication, and evaluation of a flexible electronic device using self-healing metal interconnects are described. The device was composed of self-healing metal interconnects and surface-mounted light emitting diode (LED) chips. We confirmed a decrease of impedance of the device and re-emitting of LED chips by self-healing of the broken interconnect.