Impact of Manufacturing Deviations on Serpentine Interconnect Stretchability and Its Consistency in Stretchable Inorganic Electronics With Porous Elastomer Substrates

Abstract

Abstract. Stretchable inorganic electronics have emerged as a promising technology for integrating electronic devices into complex, deformable surfaces, offering advantages in applications such as wearable electronics, health monitoring, and soft robotics. Porous elastomer substrates combine high permeability with a low effective modulus, enabling large elastic stretchability and improved breathability and wearing comfort. However, unavoidable pore inhomogeneity and interconnect misregistration introduced during the fabrication process can significantly affect the elastic stretchability and the consistency of this stretchability. In this work, we perform systematic finite element analyses of serpentine interconnect on porous elastomer substrates to quantify the effects of stochastic pore inhomogeneity and interconnect misregistration on both elastic stretchability and its consistency. The results reveal a significant trade-off between maximum stretchability and robustness: low-pore-density designs offer enhanced stretchability under ideal fabrication conditions but are highly sensitive to pore irregularities and transfer-printing misregistration, leading to large performance scatter and poor consistency. In contrast, high-pore-density designs, though inherently less stretchable, are far less sensitive to manufacturing deviations, thus maintaining small performance scatter and good predictability even when multiple deviations are present. Further analysis shows that the influence of various geometric perturbations can be rationalized by their impact on the effective suspended area of the serpentine interconnect. These findings provide quantitative guidelines for structural optimization and process-tolerance design of stretchable inorganic electronics based on porous elastomer substrates.