Analytic Study of Serpentine Electrode and Reconfigurable coplanar waveguide using Stretchable technology

Abstract

This dissertation was conducted to study parts of stretchable technology, including stretchable electrodes and a manipulation approach of stretchable technology for further device application study. In the first part, to achieve the basis of stretchable technology, a parametric study of stretchable electrode design was proceeded in this thesis. The serpentine shape electrode using current metal electrode materials was focused on this study considering potentially high compatibility with the existing electrode fabrication processes and materials. Although recent studies have reported electrodes using emerging stretchable materials, their applications are limited due to their low conductivity, which is critical to compose a high-performance device. In this thesis, in determining the shape of the existing serpentine electrode, a computer-based electrode design was introduced to overcome the existing limit of the electrode shape design. In this study, analytical investigation of strain-stress effect for each controlled serpentine electrode shape. In the second part of this thesis, Research on stretchable electromagnetic devices based on stretchable technology was also approached. Conventional devices fabricated on top of an existing rigid substrate such as silicon have limitations in modulating their physical shape because it is impossible to modify their physical parameters. To overcome this l design limitation of conventional electromagnetic devices, exploiting stretchable technology controlled shape deformation for device property modification was approached. Consequently, the shape deformable coplanar waveguide was introduced as an exemplar application study of performance modulation in the electromagnetic device. Coplanar waveguide(CPW) was suggested as an appropriate electromagnetic device shape that could directly reflect physical design shape deformation to electromagnetic properties.